Posted on 12/21/2005 12:39:30 AM PST by CAWats
Plus, Close COmbat and Flight SImulator were decent enough games. Even though they were created by subsidiaries, they were still under the MS logo.
We still have crimes that need to be stopped. I'll agree on the felony copyright infringement for profit, pirate outfits need to be stopped. But they are also charging them on the DMCA prohibition on circumvention, which I disagree with and find to be constitutionally and lawfully unsound.
There wasn't Linux before Gates.
You buy it, you own it.
You have a better memory than I! Thank you. :-)
Come on, it's conventional wisdom. To the pathologically anti-msft folks minor details like facts make no difference. Reminds me of the natives in Central America who "just knew" that Americans came down there to steal the kidneys of children.
Ooops...meant to say "Unix", rather than "Linux". Good catch!
Thanks for the heads up. I remember in the movie, the actor playing Bill Gates saying to the actor playing Jobs, "You're mad at me because I stole it first?" or something along those lines.
Hang them!
I wasn't reading it too clearly. I had at first thought they were just changing certain things in the X-Box, but if they are violating the intellectual property rights of others then that to me, is a capitol offense =o)
Because much of the code he used was contributed by others. When those others reused that code, he wrote a cease a desist letter to them, saying that they stole the code.
This kind of activity is precisely why the GPL was invented.
They were doing both, pre-loading pirated games and a new invented manner of "infringing" on the IP rights of others, circumvention of an access control mechanism.
The business model sought after lately is "You license it, you never buy it." That way they get to circumvent various consumer protection and other laws.
Do you just like making stuff up? Altair users were making copies of the paper tape that Micro-Soft and sharing them. Gates, Allen, and Davidoff wrote and original implementation of a unlicensed programming language and offered it for sale.
Altair users were making copies of the paper tape because they had contributed code to the group.
Gates then took that code and published it. The Altair users, figuring that since much of that code was theirs, took Bill's code and distributed it. Bill then published his whiny letter.
The Homebrew club had been doing this kind of thing for a long time...sharing code between them. Bill comes along and, with the advice and financial backing of his corporate lawyer father, starts making legal threats.
The history rewriters at Microsoft tend to start their history with the publishing of the compiler and convieniently forget what went on before that.
From Steven Levy's Hackers page 228:
The Homebrew Computer Club crowd was out in force when the [MITS] Caravan met at the Rickeys Hyatt on El Camino Real in Palo Alto in early June [1975], and were amazed when the found that the Altair on display was running BASIC. It was connected to a teletype which had a paper-tape reader, and once it was loaded anyone coudl type in commands and get responses instantly. It looked like a godsend to those hackers who had already sent in several hundred dollars to MITS and were impatiently waiting for BASIC....Years later, Steve Dompier tactfully described what happened next: "Somebody, I don't think anyone figured out who, borrowed one of their paper tapes lying on the floor." The paper tape in question held the current version of Altair BASIC written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Dan Sokol later recalled that vague "someone" coming up to him and, noting that Sokol worked for one of the semiconductor firms, asking if he had anyway of duplicating paper tapes....Sokol took the tape to his employer's, sat down at a PDP-11, and threaded in the tape. He ran it all night, churning out tapes, and at the next Homebrew Computer Club meeting he came with a box of tapes.
So the HCC members first got their hands on Altair BASIC after Micro-Soft had already written it. Distribution of the stolen software was not limited to those that had already ordered it from MITS.
There are lots of things you can bash Microsoft and Gates about, but Altair BASIC isn't one of them. You don't need to lie to make your point that Gates is a snake.
You want to pretend that nothing ever happened before that.
One last time: Bill Gates was using code "borrowed" from other people to create the BASIC compiler in the first place.
So when his code started getting passed around, no one thought anything of it. After all, they were all people who had contributed code in the past. Code was treated like a library book. You take it, you give it back.
Bill Gates took code, and then wanted to sell it back. Most people using hobby computers thought this was just fine, if a bit silly. No one paid for code, it came with the computer. If you wrote something, you passed it around.
Bill Gates got his start by selling software that was based, at least partly, on other people's code.
The very group of people that contributed that code is the one he attacked with that letter. He's hated the hobbyist scene ever since.
I think you're talking to yourself. Gates and Allen wrote an 8080 machine language BASIC interpreter using an emulator running on a mainframe at Harvard. They didn't invent BASIC, nor did anyone ever claim they did. But writing a version of an existing language for a new processor is not "borrowing" code.
Hate Microsoft and Bill Gates all you want, but stop lying. I offered you a quote citing two people who were part of HCC that admitted that the first time they ran BASIC on their Altairs was with a copy of the Micro-Soft code stolen from MITS. So I can either believe people who were there, one of whom made the bootleg copies, or I can believe some anonymous nutty Microsoft basher on the Internet.
Gates and Allen wrote an 8080 machine language BASIC interpreter using an emulator running on a mainframe at Harvard.
No one denies this.
They didn't invent BASIC, nor did anyone ever claim they did.
Precisely.
But writing a version of an existing language for a new processor is not "borrowing" code.
Well, that's what the debate is really about, isn't it?
Gates and Allen wrote their BASIC interpreter running on an emulator (that someone else provided the code for) on a mainframe running at Harvard (which gave Harvard a right to the code if it's sold commercially, not Gates and Allen) using the basics of the program that had been "borrowed" from other programmers.
Where it went from there is not relevant. Gates and Allen stole from other programmers (and stole from Harvard) then published their code and whined when other programmers borrowed right back.
Fact: If you or I did today (or even in 1980) what Gates and Allen did, we'd be sued into the poor house and likely jailed.
I don't particularly hate Bill Gates, well not anymore than I hate any thief.
I don't particularly begrudge him his fortune, other than the fact that the entire empire is built on the proceeds of criminal acts.
I just want Bill Gates and Co. to be held to the same standards as you or I.
Equal protection under the law and all that.
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