When 20-Year-Old Bill Gates Fought the World's First Software Pirates
7 83Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Just months after his 20th birthday, Bill Gates had already angered the programmer community," remembers this 50th-anniversary commemoration of Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists. "As the first home computers began appearing in the 1970s, the world faced a question: Would its software be free?"
Gates railed in 1976 that "Most of you steal your software." Gates had coded the BASIC interpreter for Altair's first home computer with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff — only to see it pirated by Steve Wozniak's friends at the Homebrew Computing Club. Expecting royalties, a none-too-happy Gates issued his letter in the club's newsletter (as well as Altair's own publication), complaining "I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up."
But freedom-loving coders had other ideas. When Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs released their Apple 1 home computer that summer, they stressed that "our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost..." And early open-source hackers began writing their own free Tiny Basic interpreters to create a free alternative to the Gates/Micro-Soft code. This led to the first occurrence of the phrase "Copyleft" in October of 1976.
Open Source definition author Bruce Perens shares his thoughts today. "When I left Pixar in 2000, I stopped in Steve Job's office — which for some reason was right across the hall from mine... " Perens remembered. "I asked Steve: 'You still don't believe in this Linux stuff, do you...?'" And Perens remembers how that movement finally won over Steve Jobs and carried the day. "Three years later, Steve stood onstage in front of a slide that said 'Open Source: We Think It's Great!' as he introduced the Safari browser, which at that time was based on the browser engine developed by the KDE Open Source project!"
7 comments
Operating System (Score: 5, Informative)
by Jerrry ( 43027 ) on Sunday February 01, 2026 @02:32PM (#65962820)
Gates and Allen didn't code an operating system for the Altair They coded a BASIC interpreter.
Re:Operating System (Score: 5, Informative)
by Valgrus Thunderaxe ( 8769977 ) on Sunday February 01, 2026 @02:45PM (#65962846)
On that machine, it *was* an operating system.
That Altair BASIC ... (Score: 5, Interesting)
by PPH ( 736903 ) on Sunday February 01, 2026 @02:42PM (#65962838)
Finish the story (Score: 5, Informative)
by Zero__Kelvin ( 151819 ) on Sunday February 01, 2026 @03:01PM (#65962868)
You forgot to add "then Gates went on to commit anti-trust crimes, lie to the general public claiming anyone can use a computer, and ultimately spawned the company that would set computing back decades and cause irreparable harm that continues to this day and will likely do so in perpetuity."
Re: Finish the story (Score: 5, Informative)
by Zero__Kelvin ( 151819 ) on Sunday February 01, 2026 @07:53PM (#65963332)
I was there when it happened and I know the history like the back of my hand. Your story is that forcing almost every personal computer sold in the US to have a shitty OS like DOS, then subsequently Windows on it at the time of sale, thereby eliminating competition and keeping actually skilled software developers from designing solid operating systems for them, when better alternatives already existed, is a good thing. That was a long winded way of saying you are either clueless or haven't given your post much thought.
Wrong assumption in the article (Score: 5, Interesting)
by SteveWoz ( 152247 ) on Sunday February 01, 2026 @04:11PM (#65962954)
I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.
Re:Gate's Lies and donates to hide his guilt!!!! (Score: 5, Informative)
by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) on <[slashdot] [at] [worf.net]> on Sunday February 01, 2026 @06:01PM (#65963142)
It was ethical. Just like Internet Explorer was acquired ethically.
Basically Microsoft acquired (at first) QD DOS from Seattle Computer Products under a licensing scheme. Basically he'd license it and pay SCP a fee for each customer he sold it to. He sold it to 1 customer - IBM. Microsoft later acquired SCP (rather their only programmer) for around $75K or so and thus QD DOS. But basically SCP made so little money out of it they were forced to sell to Microsoft.
And yes, one copy is correct, as IBM bought the complete rights of PC-DOS from Microsoft. (This was actually one of the two sticking points IBM had with Digital Research in trying to license CP/M - first was the NDA, second was the fact IBM wanted a free and clear license and not a per-unit royalty. The whole "Gary was out flying and IBM didn't wait" wasn't a fabrication (it was true - as Gary's wife handled all the business part while Gary was just the programmer) but more of an fabrication of what really happened - Gary's wife objected to the NDA and the all-in licensing deal and waited to wait for Gary to see if he wanted to override the decision).
What does this have to do with Internet Explorer? Same thing happened. Microsoft licensed the web browser from Spyglass Inc., on a revenue basis - that is, Spyglass would get a cut of the revenue Microsoft made reselling their browser. Well, Microsoft instead chose to give away Internet Explorer.
So yes, the software was obtained legally, but ethically it would be morally ambiguous.