
"Most of you steal your software" - duck
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/most-of-you-steal-your-software.html
======
jscheel
It's amazing, and frankly stupid, how many people try to justify theft. Sorry
guys, regardless of what utopian ideals of OSS you have, and I have them too,
you must respect the creator's wishes. If they ask you to pay for the
software, then you MUST pay for the software. Anything else is theft.

Let's say you are a freelance developer. Do you think for one second that it
would be ok for your clients to let you do all the work, then take your code
and not pay you? I mean, knowledge should be free, right? Screw the fact that
you built the software with the expectation of getting paid for your hard
work.

It's one thing to create something with the intention of sharing it with the
world. It's an entirely different thing for anybody to justify stealing what
you have done.

~~~
decode
> Sorry guys, regardless of what utopian ideals of OSS you have, and I have
> them too, you must respect the creator's wishes. If they ask you to pay for
> the software, then you MUST pay for the software. Anything else is theft.

In a legal sense, this is patently false in every country I know of. Even
ignoring the point others have made that theft is not copyright infringement
under the law, the assertion is false. Every country I know of has exceptions
to copyright law. In the US it's called Fair Use, in many Commonwealth nations
it's called Fair Dealing, in Germany it's just called "Limitations on
Copyright" (Schranken des Urheberrechts). In every case, the creator's wishes
are not absolute.

But more interesting to me is that we have taken a purely legal concept that
was completely new just 303 years ago and turned it into a broadly accepted
moral imperative. Those with a vested interest have succeeded in tying this
new legal concept to an ancient moral wrong, that of theft. And they have been
so successful at this, that many people would dismiss the distinction as
semantic quibbling. To me, this is a fascinating sociological and
philosophical phenomenon.

For anyone else who is interested in this cultural history, I highly recommend
"Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars" by William Patry.

~~~
jscheel
Good thing I'm not a complete idiot, or I wouldn't know or understand fair
use. People tend to forget that fair use is limited in its scope.
Unfortunately, a lot of people's idea of fair use is, "I want it, so I'm gonna
take it." It IS a moral imperative. It IS stealing. I don't care how you
sugarcoat it. In high-school and the first part of my college life, I pirated
music and applications with impunity. I justified it every way I could, but at
the end of the day, I realized I was stealing -- regardless of what nuanced
legal argument I could come up with. It drives me crazy when people say "it's
not stealing, it's just copyright infringement," like that magically makes
what they are doing better.

~~~
Gormo
> It IS stealing. I don't care how you sugarcoat it.

If you're going to alter the definition of "stealing" to cover things that
aren't stealing, then why stop there? Why not call copyright infringement
"arson" or "murder" too?

Making an unlicensed replica of another person's non-rival good _is not the
same thing_ as depriving another person of a rival good in their possession.
You can even hold both to be worthy of legal censure without having to advance
this disingenuous prevarication.

If you're in favor of strict IP law, do you not see how playing these semantic
games actually undermines your credibility and therefore your argument?

~~~
jscheel
The thing is, law is nothing more than codified morality. I do believe, in a
court of law, that we should make a distinction between theft and copyright.
Several Supreme Court justices agree that this is the case. However, when
looking and the very core of the issue, absent legal codification, I'm still
taking something that isn't mine, regardless of whether or not it was merely a
copy. That is where I am coming from. Responsible adults shouldn't need to
split legal hairs, we should recognize that we are, at its core, taking what
is not ours to take. There is a legal distinction, but not a moral one.

~~~
Gormo
The law is significantly divergent from morality, codified or otherwise, and
is often itself immoral.

But, that said, when looking at the issue from a purely moral perspective, the
difference becomes even more clearly illuminated: again, making a replica of
someone else's thing is utterly different from taking their thing away from
them. This isn't a hair split in the slightest: the key component of harm that
makes theft immoral _just isn't present_ with copying.

~~~
MattSayar
But you're not compensating them for the time they spent making it. They've
spent time to make this thing, and you're taking a copy of this thing without
spending a dime for their effort. It's a service. A labor. That you're not
paying for.

~~~
Gormo
So? You're not entitled for compensation for the time you spend making
anything. Your effort is neither a service nor labor done one anyone else's
behalf; it's a speculative capital investment, and your risk to bear. If I
spend millions of dollars developing a new type of camera film in 2000, and
digital cameras make film cameras obsolete before I earn a penny of revenue,
that's too bad, but no one owes me anything. Spent a billion bucks building
new houses in 2008? Sorry to hear it, but you don't get to tear down other
people's houses to restore the value of yours.

And if you say that copying is different from anything else that might
diminish your return because you think you already had some inherent right to
control whether other people make their own replicas of your stuff, then
you're begging the question; your lack of ROI can't itself be the
justification for copyright if you make such an argument.

~~~
jscheel
As soon as the straw man steps in, I have to step out. Good conversation, but
I think we are not gonna see eye to eye here.

~~~
qu4z-2
For those of us following along from home: Care to point out the strawman?

~~~
jscheel
Technological innovation in a competitive free market has nothing to do with
the original point. Meh, I'm over it. At the end of the day, I feel that
copyright infringement is stealing, and other people don't. I am fine with a
legal distinction, but I see no such distinction from a layman's moral
standpoint.

~~~
Gormo
> I feel that copyright infringement is stealing

But laws and policy aren't about feelings; they rely on consistent and precise
definitions of terms.

If anything here is a strawman, it's your insistence on equivocating two
behaviors which are substantively and observably different in their
intentions, methods, and effects, in order to apply the moral censure earned
by one disingenuously to the other.

If you want to make a meaningful argument against copyright infringement _in
its own right_ , please do so; I'd welcome the productive discourse. But
arguing against it by calling it calling it by the name of another thing
entirely - without bothering to establish a coherent connection between the
two - doesn't constitute a valid argument in the slightest.

Further, my previous comment involved nothing resembling a strawman at all;
you offered the position that copyright ought to be protected in order to
ensure that the time and labor input into the initial design of a creative
work would always yield a return for the creator, and I replied by pointing
out that these are capital expenditures, to which no one in any field is
entitled a guaranteed return at all.

Do you seriously regard as a strawman my classification of the advance
investments necessary to open a factory and the advance investments necessary
to produce a film both as capital expenditures, but simultaneously claim that
your equivocation of copyright infringement with stealing is a robust and
substantive assertion?

> I see no such distinction from a layman's moral standpoint

Then why do so many "laymen" actively assert this distinction?

Again, I have to point out that your methods of discourse actively _reduce_
the credibility of your position.

------
moccajoghurt
Don't review the letter from today's perspective.

Bill Gates didn't know that his work will spread over the world and he will
become one of the richest persons alive.

He didn't know that there will be a huge open source community in the future,
where it is normal to develop software for free.

All he knew is that he was working fulltime on something for three years and
wasn't payed for it.

For me this letter is just a snapshot of the past with an understandable point
of view.

~~~
laumars
Except, the hobbyist community back then was even further removed from
commercialisation than the open source market is today.

The hobbyist community back then was based around clubs of people sharing
their achievements; the computers they built, software they'd written and any
neat tricks they'd invented (like using the electrical interference of the
original Altar to play a tune on a radio
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgYhVnmeWrk> ). The hobbyist community was
very much driven by sharing ideas and code.

This is why people got annoyed at that letter. It not only flew against
everything the community was built around, but also made some heavy criticisms
about their members as well.

When you review that letter in the context of the community is was directed at
and the time it was written, it seems even more out of place than it does
today.

------
rvkennedy
It's a pity that the then Micro-soft did not have copy protection technology -
if they had, they might never have established such a strong foothold in the
market, and the history of computing would have been quite different.

~~~
zdw
Yeah, they look like they've really been hurting for years now...

(oh come one people, downvotes? You can't tell the OP is attempting humor, and
I'm trying to acknowledge that?)

~~~
saraid216
From HN Guidelines:

> Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it
> makes boring reading.

~~~
DigitalJack
Resist quoting from HN Guidelines. It never does any good, and it makes boring
reading.

~~~
saraid216
If you were right, then I would.

------
alan_cx
... and as a result poor Bill has lived in total poverty, only to die of
scurvy in a slum. His business died with out trace and he never been heard of
since. A tragic story. Yes, bad hobbyists.

Point being, despite all the piracy, there is still some money to be made. The
complaint is that such folk are not making enough money. See, Bill should be
twice or 3 times as rich. Man, he's really losing out.

Of course then we have to deal with the age old assumption that every person
with a pirated copy would have paid for it. Which is, er, optimistic, at best.
IMHO, the loss is negligible. All they the copyright owner gets in reality is
the satisfaction that not so many people use their product, but those who do
pay.

I'm not that happy at hitting Bill with this as he is one of the filthy rich
people who actually uses his accumulated wealth for good causes. Which is
ideal really.

~~~
ghjm
But he wasn't, or anything close to it, when he wrote this letter.

~~~
rbanffy
He wasn't anything close to poverty either.

~~~
OGinparadise
_He wasn't anything close to poverty either._

OK, if you aren't poor, give me $10K then. According to me, you have enough!

~~~
rbanffy
That, in 1955 dollars, would be about 1% of the trust fund one of his
grandparents established for him.

Still, I think he would resist your offer. What would you do with US$10K?

------
orangethirty
Bill Gates sure is a great marketer. Igniting this issue in such direct way
made people pay attention. No wonder he was able to build MS into what it
_was_.

~~~
codeulike
Yeah, note that the letter carefully mentions many different products that are
available or coming soon

~~~
walid
Interesting point. Didn't recognize that.

------
shmerl
Yes, this is a famous letter which can be considered a foundation of
Microsoft's historic hostility to any open technologies.

~~~
codeulike
Its just a letter complaining about a product being pirated. It only shocked
people because the idea of end-consumers paying for software was novel then.

~~~
shmerl
The point is that it demonstrates the core ideas which Bill Gates put in
action in Microsoft. I.e. aggressive IP methodology.

------
fossuser
There was a good write up of the context surrounding this letter in Steven
Levy's book, Hackers
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution)).

It pissed off seemingly everyone in the community and seemed to be against the
spirit of what the hackers were doing at the time (writing and sharing code).

I recall another programmer being irritated by the letter and writing his own
basic interpreter and asking $5 for it (which was far less than what Gates was
asking).

Book is worth reading for the historical context of computing if you weren't
around to see it.

####

Edit [Relevant part of wikipedia page]:

Tiny BASIC: Altair BASIC was an interpreter that translated instructions from
the BASIC programming language into assembly instructions that the Altair 8800
could understand. It was developed by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders
of Micro-soft, specifically for the Altair 8800 and it would fit in 4K of
memory. Unlike previous hackers and against the Hacker Ethic, Micro-Soft and
MITS felt that people should pay for BASIC just like they paid for any add-on
card. Many hackers had in fact put in orders for BASIC, but still had to wait
for the order to be shipped. During a show put up by MITS, someone got hold of
and copied a paper tape containing Altair BASIC.

The tapes were duplicated and passed around freely before the commercial
product was even shipped to customers. Gates and Allen did not appreciate this
turn of events since they were actually paid commission for each copy of BASIC
that MITS sold. Gates responded by writing an open letter titled “Open Letter
to Hobbyists” that considered the sharing of software to be theft. Tiny BASIC
was a similar interpreter that would fit in only 2K of memory as it supported
a subset of the functionality of Micro-Soft BASIC (which itself was a subset
of Dartmouth BASIC).

It was developed by Dick Whipple and John Arnold in Tyler, Texas and
distributed freely in PCC magazine. Many more people sent in improvements and
programs developed in Tiny BASIC to be published. This eventually led to the
creation of Dr. Dobb's Journal edited by Jim Warren that distributed free or
very inexpensive software in response to Gates' claims of theft. Tom Pittman
was someone else who did not take kindly to Gates' words. He wrote a version
of Tiny BASIC for the Motorola 6800 microprocessor.

Although he sold it to AMI for $3,500, he retained the rights to sell it to
others and decided to charge only $5 for it. He received many orders and even
money from people who had already gotten a copy and simply wanted to pay him
for his efforts. Pittman also wrote the essay “Deus Ex Machina” on the AI and
hardware hackers and what tied them together. Lee Felsenstein and Bob Marsh
banded together to create a fully contained computer for an issue of Popular
Electronics that they called SOL that sold for under a thousand dollars.

####

------
johnpowell
>Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC.

I guess old habits die hard.

~~~
notJim
Are you referring to the obtuse names?

~~~
Confusion
Probably to the tendency to produce _n_ slightly different versions in an
attempt to segmentize the market.

~~~
vidarh
That actually made sense when a difference of a few KB meant a difference
between whether or not you'd be able to fit your own application into memory.

There was at least one early BASIC extension, for example, where you could
pick the commands you wanted "a la carte", with number of _bytes_ required for
each one of them listed, to pack the ones that were most important for you to
fit into a specific size. You'd pay for the size you chose.

------
nextparadigms
Imagine if there would've been a way to force 100% of people who got Windows
in China, India, and other poor countries all over the world to _pay up_ $100
or more for their copy.

If that would've been at all possible, I think Linux would've had higher than
50% market share in the PC market today. For that kind of poor countries,
Windows licenses were and still are prohibitively expensive for the vast
majority of their citizens, so if being _forced_ to buy Windows instead of
pirating it, I think most would've just gone with Linux, and its adoption
would've exploded within a few years, from the moment _everyone_ in poor
countries had to make that decision. Therefore software support from the big
vendors would've arrived relatively quickly.

Unfortunately for us (and fortunately for Microsoft), there was no way to
force people into that decision, so we were left with a Windows monopoly for
the past 2 decades.

~~~
renanbirck
This is the major problem I have while trying to tell people about Linux (and
other open-source software). It's hard to argue against "my [proprietary
software] copy was free" - when effectively, it was, since nothing will happen
to them.

------
narcissus
I read once where Bill Gates predicted that eventually people would buy
software and that the hardware would be free. I can't remember where I read it
('Business at the Speed of Light', maybe?) but it stuck with me as just, well,
ridiculous.

Anyway, the fact that he says "As the majority of hobbyists must be aware,
most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is
something to share." kind of makes me wonder how he _ever_ ended up with that
thought I mentioned at the start.

And I know it sounds crazy that he would ever think that: that's why it stuck
with me I guess.

~~~
bconway
_I read once where Bill Gates predicted that eventually people would buy
software and that the hardware would be free. I can't remember where I read it
('Business at the Speed of Light', maybe?) but it stuck with me as just, well,
ridiculous._

Have you looked at any carrier's web site recently? Tons of $0 full-featured
Android smartphones, and tons of apps for sale (subsidized by service fees, of
course).

We're already there.

~~~
narcissus
I guess when I read it I didn't think "hardware is free as in you'll be paying
for a contract of service where the cost of that service includes the cost of
the hardware".

I mean, if we're to be able to redefine 'actual' costs like that, maybe my
house is free... it's just included in the cost of my bank sending me a
statement every month.

I do see your point, though: it definitely _seems_ that way, but surely nobody
can argue that the production cost of one more piece of hardware is more
'free' than that of a piece of software.

------
slajax
I think he would say now that this letter was rather short sighted. It seems
the theft of basic by hobbyists _may_ have lead to the catalyst needed for his
software to dominate the commercial PC market some years later. Clearly it
wasn't just him developing software for these computers. I wonder how they
attributed licensing to it. Or if there even was such a thing at that time.

Funny how some things change, yet stay the same. Glad the OP posted this.

------
icambron
I readily grant that there's a huge amount of selection bias to this, but from
this remove, it's difficult not to read this as, "pirate all the software you
please, we'll still end up as billionaires."

~~~
slurgfest
Right, if a failed company (even one which failed because of piracy) had a
letter like this, you wouldn't be reading it.

~~~
icambron
My only reservation on that line of argument is that, apparently, it "caused
quite a stir at the time". But yes, the selection bias here is real enough.

------
joemcm
Such a great precursor to what goes on nowadays with music and such.

~~~
tnuc
Except the record labels would rather hand out huge fines and jail sentences.

------
meaty
The irony is that Microsoft made it even easier to steal stuff by forcing
complete market dominance.

It's easy to steal if everything is compatible and connected i.e the
DOS/Windows monoculture.

------
Wingman4l7
Wikipedia has a pretty extensive article on this famous letter:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists>

~~~
mct
An interesting line from that article, which I hadn't previously seen:

> _In early 1976 ads for its Apple I computer, Apple Inc made the claims that
> "our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal
> cost"[23] and "yes folks, Apple BASIC is Free"[24]_

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Joel Spolsky had an interesting article on this idea [1], he said "smart
companies try to commoditize their products' complements."

[1] <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html>

~~~
speeder
Interesting how he predicts the reason for Sun demise.

~~~
thebluesky
Not really a prediction if it's something he was already observing.

------
cafard
"The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000."

Pardon me, but wasn't a fair bit of that Harvard's computing power, ergo not
directly paid for by Gates et al.?

~~~
STRML
I would assume that's why it was worded the way it was, instead of "We have
spent in excess of $40,000 on computer time."

