‘An Open Letter to Hobbyists,’ typed by William Henry (Bill) Gates III, was shared with the budding computer hobbyist community 50 years ago this week. The letter makes it clear that, even from the start of the personal computer business, there has always been a problem with software piracy.
The New York Times archives include a copy of the February 1976 letter, in which an irked Gates explains how unfair it is that ‘Micro-Soft’ Altair BASIC is flagrantly stolen, copied, and redistributed by the hobbyist market. This edition of BASIC was the firm’s first commercial offering, created by Gates and co-founder Paul Allen, written for the MITS Altair 8800.
The Altair 8800, with its Intel 8080 CPU and S-100 bus cards, ignited the desktop personal computer revolution in 1975. It rapidly became central to the establishment of the PC hobbyist movement, community, and ecosystem. This is despite the system’s rudimentary kit form and lack of a keyboard or screen, in its default configuration.
Gates begins his open letter by explaining the costs of developing and the attractions of a good software ecosystem for hobbyists. He logically turns to outline the costs involved in producing 'Micro-Soft' software. Then he begins to show frustration by informing readers that he gets feedback from hundreds of Altair BASIC users, despite “most of these ‘users’ never bought BASIC.” This is just the beginning of Gates’ rant.
“Most of you steal your software”
Wikipedia provides some important background, which helps explain the frustration of Gates. In brief, it says that a pre-release version of Altair BASIC was acquired by members of the famous Homebrew Computer Club and copied using a high-speed tape punch (50 copies). Moreover, other hobbyists bundled this version of Altair BASIC ‘free’ with their memory board hardware projects.
Now in full-throttle complain mode, “As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software,” Gates wrote. “Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?”
In addition to this injustice, Gates appealed to the sensibilities of the community by asserting that further high-quality hobby software development would only be attractive if more users paid. The business model, with costs in development, computer time, manuals, media, and so on, made Micro-Soft nothing more than “a break-even operation,” grumbled Gates.
If the Altair hobbyist community were more fair, he went on to suggest, “Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.”
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