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An open letter to hobbyists by Bill Gates (1976)

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Re: An open letter to hobbyists by Bill Gates (1976)

#41

Post by belorn »

wmf wrote: post #32
belorn wrote: post #25

> "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?" Yes who can do professional interpreters for free. Guido van Rossum could not possible put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, and document his product for free. This is after all what this letter is about. An interpreter for a progr…

I don't think anecdotes are that helpful at understanding Gates's message here. Yes, today there are open source versions of pretty much all developer tools (and that's something to celebrate, since I remember when a "cheap" C compiler was $500). But there's still plenty of software that has no open source equal; if we had a world where nobody paid for software, much of it wouldn't have ever been written.

When looking back at letters like this, its important to be at least aware of the context. I don't think ignoring the context of the letter is helpful at all in understanding why it was written by Bill Gates.

Taken outside the context, one can surely have a discussion about how much software would be made if developers can't use government help as basis for their business model.

Re: An open letter to hobbyists by Bill Gates (1976)

#44

Post by einhverfr »

Fascinating write-up which puts the economics of proprietary vs open source in full view. Gates was unhappy in the letter because it was hard to make money charging license fees in arrears. In my business, I charge for a lot of development up front.

The lesson I take away from this is that conventional software licensing, while it addresses a legitimate need in some areas of software (the need to diffuse development costs), means effectively not only shifting risk onto the developer but increasing it by orders of magnitude. The sort of risk that one has from investing in a feature for an open source project is far less than the risk that a software house takes in building the next version, because they take on all risk, centralize it, and then hope to make it back through control. This doesn't reduce risk for the end user though by very much.

Re: An open letter to hobbyists by Bill Gates (1976)

#46

Post by adventured »

Ologn wrote: post #27

Regarding the commercial BASIC project mentioned in this letter - Gates facilitated non-student Allen coming onto the Harvard campus, to use a computer they did not have permission to use for their commercial project. The computer they were using without authorization was one which was being used by the US military. Like Mark Zuckerberg in later years, Gates was called up before the Harvard Ad board for this. From Pa…

At the time of that letter, how much of their software being sold was developed at Harvard? And did they specifically sell any software they developed while at Harvard (and on Harvard's dime)?

Gates of course has given Harvard tens of millions of dollars. Harvard got an amazing return on its computing bills.

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