
A Pirate’s Life for Me, Part 1: Don’t Copy That Floppy - smacktoward
http://www.filfre.net/2015/12/a-pirates-life-for-me-part-1-dont-copy-that-floppy/
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hayksaakian
Interesting note from the OP highlights that Bill Gates' infamous open later
was 7 years before the courts actually decided copyright status for software.

The Franklin computer case is also interesting due to it's connection to
Apple.

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jakejake
It's interesting that the money at stake at the time when Gates and Allen
started Microsoft was in the 5 figure range. It's funny how in hindsight
everybody was trying to "change the world" but in reality, they were saying
nothing of the sort and were probably only hoping for a 6-figure paycheck.

I wonder how we'll look back at all of the people currently proclaiming that
they are, in fact, trying to change the world..?!

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orionblastar
The thing was Micro-Soft at the time was selling BASIC, COBOL, and FORTRAN
languages without paying a license fee to use them from the college or company
that held the copyright license. You could say that Microsoft made a clone of
the languages for microcomputers, but did not invent the languages themselves.
This cut down on research and design costs to use an existing language and
write a clone of it instead of paying a license fee for the language software
and port that.

So at the time the people who pirated Micro-soft tapes and floppies claimed
that it was an illegal port in the first place. I don't know if they are
correct or not but copyright was not enforced in the 1970s and 1980s because
they had different IP laws then than we do now.

When Microsoft bought 86-DOS/Q-DOS it had violated CP/M-86 patents by using
the API and in fact there was a CP/M to DOS converter for programs because of
how similar both operating systems were. [http://www.wired.com/2012/08/ms-dos-
examined-for-thef/](http://www.wired.com/2012/08/ms-dos-examined-for-thef/)
But as it turns out you can't copyright an API and Linux uses the Unix API.

So saying Microsoft stole IP is very hard to say, they did develop
alternatives to the originals that their software did the same things as. None
of what they made early on they sold was original and was based on something
else.

The only reason why IBM chose DOS instead of CP/M is that DOS cost less per
license than CP/M. Plus IBM got access to Microsoft BASIC for their PC ROM.

Micro-Soft saw a need for a programming language for many microcomputers that
didn't even have software yet, it allowed others to use the languages to write
software for the many different microcomputers. So in a way Microsoft making
their own version of those languages without paying a license fee opened up a
lot of doors for the 8 bit and 16 bit market. Because no other company was
doing that at that time.

To this day many free and open source projects make clones of the original
products by using the same API as the original and writing their own code from
scratch. If API becomes copyrighted it would shut those projects down.

The IBM PC Clone market only happened because they cloned the PC BIOS by
reverse engineering it and writing their own BIOS that uses the same API calls
as IBM's BIOS. Then Microsoft licensed MS-DOS to the PC clone companies who
made PCs cheaper than IBM and lead to a reduction in cost of microcomputers.

So in honesty Microsoft sort of started the API cloning business and it
allowed the PC Cloners to take over IBM's marketshare and drive IBM out of the
PC business.

~~~
Someone
_" The only reason why IBM chose DOS instead of CP/M is that DOS cost less per
license than CP/M."_

IBM didn't choose DOS; the market did. The original PC could be bought with
either PC-DOS, CP/M-86, or UCSD p-System.

IIRC, the DOS version was cheaper, and, possibly, available a few months
earlier, but in those times, the latter did not imply that the race was run
before it started in those times.

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chillingeffect
I enjoyed this until the last paragraph, when I got a strong Murray Gell-Mann
amnesia effect ([http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2011/08/the-murray-
ge...](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2011/08/the-murray-gell-mann-
amnesia-effect/)).

I was more than a casual part of the scene. The following might have been an
attempt at humor, but is revisionist:

"the scene was, among other things, a cesspool of adolescent nihilism, teenage
posturing, and crude social Darwinism, teeming with racism, sexism, and
homophobia."

It had hierarchies. You had to be cool, connected, socislly smart and willing
to take risks to succeed. There was lo-resolution porn. There was overlap with
phone phreaks and some people who stole phone cards. Most just used the mail
or person-to-person. The scene was actually bursting with creativity, joy
healthy competition and sharing. Cracktros are fundamentally celebratory
music.

But the SJW junk is made up misandry. Don't believe everything you read.

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lsh
The "Don't Copy that Floppy" rap:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI)

bodacious.

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cheez
This presages the development of SaaS. Software is, if you're lucky, a means
to an end. No one pays you for the means, they pay you for the end. When
you're building your own house, you can often get it built for less than half
the price you would pay down the street because of this phenomenon.

Looks like Microsoft caught up to this reality.

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donatj
Did Microsoft ever release the APL implementations Bill Gates mentioned?

