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Why Gates gets the short end of the stick. Instead of buy a license to make BASIC, they wrote their own version of it. Wrote their own COBOL and FORTRAN without

Why Gates gets the short end of the stick. Instead of buy a license to make BASIC, they wrote their own version of it. Wrote their own COBOL and FORTRAN without a license as well. This took money away from IP holders, but gave birth to a lot of Microcomputers. Before MS-DOS there was CP/M and UNIX. After selling IBM PC-DOS, Gates had MS-DOS 2.0 made for PC clones after Compaq and a few others wrote a clone BIOS. They had to reverse engineer the BIOS in one room, and build their own BIOS in another. It was the cheaper PC clones that put an end to TRS-80, CP/M, Apple //, etc. Windows was a cheap knock off of the Macintosh GUI, I used to have a blog that had an article that Bill Gates stole from Steve Jobs to make Windows because Steve Jobs would not give him permission to license the Mac OS. Sure Apple and Microsoft settled it out of court by Microsoft investing money in Apple to save it. But a lot of Apple fans don't like how Gates had cheated Jobs originally. Even if Microsoft was not the first company to invent these things, they filed for patents anyway. But I will say something positive about Gates, his monopoly created a Windows standard by forcing OEMs to pay the Windows tax per PC even if they didn't use Windows. So that killed the Amiga, Atari ST and other third parties as PC clones became so cheap in the early 1990s that the market was flooded by them. Jack Tramiel founded Commodore and got into war with other companies in the same way Steve Jobs went to war with IBM. Without Jack Tramiel and the home computer wars that lead to $200 Commodore 64 ect systems, a lot of families would not be able to afford a computer to learn on. Commodore got a primitive version of Microsoft BASIC so they got a cheap license per computer. The open system PC was IBM using off the shelf parts from Intel and other companies. Using the ISA bus for example for expansion cards.

slrz 10y ago
Wrote their own COBOL and FORTRAN without a license as well. This took money away from IP holders, but gave birth to a lot of Microcomputers. What IP holders? Those of other FORTRAN implementations? So if I'm writing a C compiler I'm "taking money away" from the developers of existing compilers? Like, I'm doing something despicable, as apparently, that money belongs to them?
- orionblastar 10y ago
  You have to remember it was in the 1970s before free and open source software existed. Back then if you wanted to use C or UNIX you had to license it from Bell Labs. If you wanted BASIC you had to license it from Dartmouth, if you wanted COBOL you had to license it from The navy and Grace Hopper, etc. Over times things have changed and free and open source versions of those languages got written. But try to make a free and open source version of the Intel Mac BIOS, try to make a clone of MacOSX, try to make a version of XCode that runs in Linux and submits apps to the Apple App Store, etc. You need an Intel Mac for that and Apple's MacOSX and XCode. So not everything is free and open source or has an alternative to it. For example Microsoft made Windows that basically stole the Mac GUI IP without permission. Windows sold so well that Apple started to have financial problems. In that case it was taking money away from Apple.
  - slrz 10y ago
    In the case of FORTRAN, there already was a language standard as early as 1966. At the same time there existed implementations of it that were independent of IBM. Also, while you had to get a UNIX license from AT&T, they didn't make any money from it (well, they weren't allowed to) and at the time, it came with full sources. Yes, the term FOSS didn't exist yet but people shared source code anyway, at least in the academic/research environments where UNIX was popular. You're right in that things were much worse in the commercial office and home computer market.

slrz 10y ago

Wrote their own COBOL and FORTRAN without a license as well. This took money away from IP holders, but gave birth to a lot of Microcomputers. What IP holders? Those of other FORTRAN implementations? So if I'm writing a C compiler I'm "taking money away" from the developers of existing compilers? Like, I'm doing something despicable, as apparently, that money belongs to them?

orionblastar 10y ago
You have to remember it was in the 1970s before free and open source software existed. Back then if you wanted to use C or UNIX you had to license it from Bell Labs. If you wanted BASIC you had to license it from Dartmouth, if you wanted COBOL you had to license it from The navy and Grace Hopper, etc. Over times things have changed and free and open source versions of those languages got written. But try to make a free and open source version of the Intel Mac BIOS, try to make a clone of MacOSX, try to make a version of XCode that runs in Linux and submits apps to the Apple App Store, etc. You need an Intel Mac for that and Apple's MacOSX and XCode. So not everything is free and open source or has an alternative to it. For example Microsoft made Windows that basically stole the Mac GUI IP without permission. Windows sold so well that Apple started to have financial problems. In that case it was taking money away from Apple.
- slrz 10y ago
  In the case of FORTRAN, there already was a language standard as early as 1966. At the same time there existed implementations of it that were independent of IBM. Also, while you had to get a UNIX license from AT&T, they didn't make any money from it (well, they weren't allowed to) and at the time, it came with full sources. Yes, the term FOSS didn't exist yet but people shared source code anyway, at least in the academic/research environments where UNIX was popular. You're right in that things were much worse in the commercial office and home computer market.