An open letter to hobbyists by Bill Gates (1976)

This cannot be understated. Different company and a smaller niche, but proprietary file formats have plagued the GIS industry for decades. The most widely used format (shapefile) is about as terrible as it gets as far as functionality goes, but it is used everywhere. There has been a mounting effort to persuade governments to use open formats for publishing data, but it has been slow going.

There was a good write up of the context surrounding this letter in Steven Levy's book, Hackers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer...).

It pissed off lots of people in the community and seemed to be against the spirit of what the hackers were doing at the time (writing and sharing code).

I recall another programmer being irritated by the letter and writing his own basic interpreter and asking $5 for it (which was far less than what Gates was asking).

Book is worth reading for the historical context of computing if you weren't around to see it.

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Edit [Relevant part of wikipedia page]: Tiny BASIC: Altair BASIC was an interpreter that translated instructions from the BASIC programming language into assembly instructions that the Altair 8800 could understand. It was developed by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Micro-soft, specifically for the Altair 8800 and it would fit in 4K of memory. Unlike previous hackers and against the Hacker Ethic, Micro-Soft and MITS felt that people should pay for BASIC just like they paid for any add-on card. Many hackers had in fact put in orders for BASIC, but still had to wait for the order to be shipped. During a show put up by MITS, someone got hold of and copied a paper tape containing Altair BASIC.

The tapes were duplicated and passed around freely before the commercial product was even shipped to customers. Gates and Allen did not appreciate this turn of events since they were actually paid commission for each copy of BASIC that MITS sold. Gates responded by writing an open letter titled “Open Letter to Hobbyists” that considered the sharing of software to be theft. Tiny BASIC was a similar interpreter that would fit in only 2K of memory as it supported a subset of the functionality of Micro-Soft BASIC (which itself was a subset of Dartmouth BASIC).

It was developed by Dick Whipple and John Arnold in Tyler, Texas and distributed freely in PCC magazine. Many more people sent in improvements and programs developed in Tiny BASIC to be published. This eventually led to the creation of Dr. Dobb's Journal edited by Jim Warren that distributed free or very inexpensive software in response to Gates' claims of theft. Tom Pittman was someone else who did not take kindly to Gates' words. He wrote a version of Tiny BASIC for the Motorola 6800 microprocessor.

Although he sold it to AMI for $3,500, he retained the rights to sell it to others and decided to charge only $5 for it. He received many orders and even money from people who had already gotten a copy and simply wanted to pay him for his efforts. Pittman also wrote the essay “Deus Ex Machina” on the AI and hardware hackers and what tied them together. Lee Felsenstein and Bob Marsh banded together to create a fully contained computer for an issue of Popular Electronics that they called SOL that sold for under a thousand dollars.

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Yes: copyright infringement. US law also calls it that and not theft[1].

Also note the disparity: if you pay for software, you don't own it, you license it; but if you get it without paying, some call it theft.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#.22Theft...

Keep in mind that the details surrounding copyrighting of software weren't solidified until the Copyright Act of 1976, which didn't go into law until 1978.

So at the time this letter was written, Micro-Soft's software didn't receive the automatic copyright protection we know of today.

Re: Your response to point (1). My statement stands. A development cost of $50k is a development cost of $50k regardless of how many copies are sold. Pirated copies do not cost the developer extra production expenses the way stolen physical merchandise would. If someone stole copies of Excel from a Best Buy, there would be costs associated with the packaging, DVD production, distribution, etc. that would need to be absorbed in order to replace the lost product. The only added cost per item online is the bandwidth cost, but that is absorbed by the person distributing cracked software rather than the original developer.