6 ms·

Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists

36 points by acangiano 17y ago

thetrumanshow 17y ago
"Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?" Now, this is practically a prerequisite for getting a job at a good company.
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? This statement also sounds much more ironic from today's perspective, when there are thousands of open source projects that literally run off this concept.
  - borism 17y ago
    let's rephrase that a bit: What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free for a living?
    - gxs 17y ago
      That is exactly how I took it, and it stands today.
    - shpxnvz 17y ago
      It's not a hobby if you intend to make a living.
      - borism 17y ago
        You can make a living out of hobby. But that's not how most open source developers make a living.
    - whughes 17y ago
      Your rephrasing doesn't make any sense. Bill Gates wants to convince people that hobbyism can't create good software, and he needs the money. Why should the audience (pirates) care about whether hobbyists make a living, as long as they get their software?
      - borism 17y ago
        I was replying to a misconception that somehow today thousands of open source contributors can make a living by simply being that. That's not the case with 99% of open source developers I know.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - MaysonL 17y ago
      One who sold his startup, or has a big enough 401K, and feels like changing the world instead of making more money.
- spot 17y ago
  they found all the bugs?? but seriously, gates continues to maintain the fiction that open source = hobbyists not getting paid.
  - almost 17y ago
    This letter was written quite some time ago, it's certainly not an attack on open source never mind a continuing one :p
    - spot 17y ago
      i know it's an old letter. what i said was based on what i heard gates say last month. he "continues" it today, in addition to doing it back then.
- chriseppstein 17y ago
  I've heard of a few companies that have this prerequisite, but only a few. I think open source contributions can tip the scales if you're up against a bunch of great candidates, but I don't think the business world works like you make it sound. In fact, I know lots of companies would actually shy away from open source contributors.
  - DarkShikari 17y ago
    I know lots of companies would actually shy away from open source contributors. That's great--a perfect way to filter out companies that I would never want to work for.
  - falsestprophet 17y ago
    I know lots of companies would actually shy away from open source contributors. Which companies? Why do you think they do?
    - joshz 17y ago
      I interviewed with one. A .NET web development studio, can't remember who specifically. They called the stuff I did "open-sourcy" and I could tell they looked down on it. I think it's the perception that cheap programmers use cheap tools, produce cheap code and are low quality.
      - TwoSheds 17y ago
        I see a significant difference between the .Net and Java developer cultures. It would be hard for me to believe that a Java shop would behave according to your description.
RevRal 17y ago
The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour. I once calculated my per hour wage from the work I did. About $1.50 Hang in there Bill!
- staunch 17y ago
  His $2/hour in 1976 is ~$8/hour in 2009 dollars.
blhack 17y ago
You guys laugh... Keep in mind that, at this point, microsoft was pretty much nothing... Here was a guy that built something with the intent to sell it, and people said "too bad". Of course he was upset about that. Now, should he have been philanthropic enough to have just given it away to the community? Maybe, but it doesn't really matter...he coded it, and he did so thinking he would be able to sell it. I equate those that copied BASIC then to the people that use adblock now. No, they're not really harming the author, but it is a bit discourteous. I think he was just trying to illustrate that "C'mon, guys...I worked really hard on this...I'm not suing you, but just please buy it instead :)"
- CamperBob 17y ago
  That's funny, I equate someone who uses intrusive ads on his website to someone who writes a free BASIC interpreter that stops after every 12 lines and PRINTs an ad to my console. If you're going to put something out there, free or otherwise, it's your problem to make sure that it's fit for my purpose.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    If it's not fit for your purposes, fine. Don't use it.
    - CamperBob 17y ago
      If it's not fit for my purpose, then I'm somewhat less than interested in hearing you whine about how I didn't pay for it, or about how I used AdBlock to get what value I could out of it. You're not entitled to my money, and I'm not entitled to your content. The difference is, though, I didn't dangle my wallet on the Internet with the intent of wasting everybody's time.
      - tptacek 17y ago
        It's funny to see people getting self righteous about evading the intent of content owners. I'm not entitled to your wallet. But if you leave it on the table in my office...
thwarted 17y ago
The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour. This was an early version "I did it, I should get paid for it" feeling of entitlement. If your intent is to make serious money, why would you spend your time doing something that ultimately paid only $2/hr? Why are you trying to sell to people who are unwilling or unable to pay for the product or service? These sound like an obvious recipe for failure. Fortunately for Microsoft, the deals they did that gave them a captive business audience who wanted to pay for DOS, as it became the defacto standard, this ranting was later moot. And now Microsoft offers deep discounts and free stuff just to get you to use their products (for various business and marketing reasons).
- Dilpil 17y ago
  It is one thing to make a product no one wants and complain about making no money. Expressing dissapointment over not making money off of a product because it is universally stolen is a reasonable sentiment.
  - thwarted 17y ago
    It's reasonable to complain. It's also reasonable, and I'd like to think expected, that if you created something that you can't get people to pay for, and they are stealing it, you'd get out of the business of providing that specific thing that can be stolen, or you invest in copy protection (which is a losing game anyway). Eventually Microsoft did get out of the business of trying to sell to hobbyists. He acknowledges that it wasn't universally stolen: the income was approximately $2/hr. If it was universally stolen, the income would have been $0/hr. But what he was missing was that it was universally wanted, there was a demand for it. This means he didn't set a price that the market was willing or able to bear, and the market told him the price that it was willing to bear. One way to adjust prices in the face of piracy is to take the total income divided by the total number of users (this is an iterative process, because this might not be immediately measurable). Considering what people had to go through to obtain copies on the Altair (making copies of paper tapes), the price set ($500 for the standalone version according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists ; approx $1900 in 2009 dollars) was way too high considering the effort of copying. At some lower price point, the effort of copying is too much for the price set. While it's nice to be able set whatever price you want and think you're going to get it, that isn't the case. And banking on being able to sell at some arbitrary price is folly. Because you'd be in the same situation if the people DIDN'T even bother to copy it in the first place, the only difference is that you get to complain that people are using it without paying. Charging $500 for something that is in high demand and is easily copyable, well, that's a huge mistake. The market is telling you there is interest, but you're not meeting the buyers, so they subvert you. And while it's unfortunate that all this effort and money and time was expended up front and now the bill comes due for, setting the wrong price, which discourages sales and encourages piracy, is bad market research. And Microsoft changed in that regard too, for a long time now Microsoft has been known for its marketing juggernaut.
jacquesm 17y ago
So, nothing changed in all that time. Micro-Soft found out the hard way that hobbyists are 'cheap'. And managed to sell a veritable fortune of software to nicely locked in businesses. Meanwhile the 'hobbyists' slowly grew in numbers until they outnumbered the 'professionals' (and plenty of them were professionals during the day and 'hobbyists' in the evenings and weekends). And then the web happened, and Microsoft blinked and open source took it and ran with it. And now, because of that they're facing the first real competition since their inception. Google would not have happened if it hadn't been for linux, and Sun and SGI would still be in business as well. The world is changing, rapidly. Let's hope it changes fast enough.
- btilly 17y ago
  The bit about "Microsoft blinked" is more complicated than that. The period where they blinked and Linux took off was one where they were distracted by a US anti-trust case. Then when they got ready to come back in force there was a European anti-trust case with large enough fines to actually get their attention.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    From the history of microsoft in wikipedia: "On, May 26, 1995, Bill Gates sent the "Internet Tidal Wave" memorandum to Microsoft executives. The memo described Netscape with their Netscape Navigator as a "new competitor 'born' on the Internet." The memo outlines Microsoft's failure to grasp the Internet's importance, and in it Gates assigns "the Internet this highest level of importance" from then on." Read it for yourself at: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/exhibits/20.pdf http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/exhibits/20.pdf That's an exhibit from the lawsuit, which came much later.
    - btilly 17y ago
      The key question is, "When did open source take it and run with it?" After 1995 Microsoft came back, quickly won the browser war, and was putting together their server strategy. I argue that 1998 was the key year. Here are some highlights. In Feb the term Open Source was created. In April Netscape open sourced Mozilla. In May the Microsoft antitrust case began. In June IBM announced support for Apache. In July both Oracle and Informix announced support for Linux. And in the same month we got the first truly mainstream press coverage of Linux that I'm aware of, Forbes Magazine ran Linus on the cover, and had a good article discussing open source. (Wonderful goodwill that they later destroyed with their horrible SCO reporting.) I submit that had the lawsuit not started in May, then we would not have had the big announcements from Informix, Oracle and IBM. And during that explosion we would have seen dirty tricks from Microsoft to leverage their browser market into controlling the server as well.
dkeskar 17y ago
One ventures into a market hoping it would be profitable. It does not, so one tries to "train the customers". That letter probably didn't increase sales. But this guy and his company managed to hang around making revenues until they were approached as a partner by some large company that knew how to get customers to pay through their noses.
ScottWhigham 17y ago
It stands the test of time - 33 years later, developers are still complaining about the same things. I found that rather amusing - so much has changed yet much is still the same. If you believe anything out of the BSA, last year was a record year with more than $50 billion in software piracy: http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/index.html http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/index.html
- nkassis 17y ago
  I don't believe anything they say so... how much was really stolen?
alexgartrell 17y ago
At the end of the day, someone stole his stuff, so he got pissed. He over-generalized and argued the wrong point, and hindsight kind of made it so he made an ass of himself. That said, there really are very few people alive who haven't gotten mad and made an ass of themselves at some point, so we should probably forgive this "Open Letter to Hobbyists". (I saw Gates talk when we opened a new building on Campus and someone asked him about the huge piracy rates in China so he brought up this letter in particular and said he's since learned to not get bent out of shape about it)
tomjen2 17y ago
And now you can download the lastest version of basic directly from Microsoft completely legal. Oh well.
lurkinggrue 17y ago
Didn't the hobbyists respond this way: LOL! Not sure if I am remembering my history correctly.

36 points by acangiano 17y ago

"Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?" Now, this is practically a prerequisite for getting a job at a good company.

DarkShikari 17y ago
What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? This statement also sounds much more ironic from today's perspective, when there are thousands of open source projects that literally run off this concept.
- borism 17y ago
  let's rephrase that a bit: What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free for a living?
  - gxs 17y ago
    That is exactly how I took it, and it stands today.
  - shpxnvz 17y ago
    It's not a hobby if you intend to make a living.
    - borism 17y ago
      You can make a living out of hobby. But that's not how most open source developers make a living.
  - whughes 17y ago
    Your rephrasing doesn't make any sense. Bill Gates wants to convince people that hobbyism can't create good software, and he needs the money. Why should the audience (pirates) care about whether hobbyists make a living, as long as they get their software?
    - borism 17y ago
      I was replying to a misconception that somehow today thousands of open source contributors can make a living by simply being that. That's not the case with 99% of open source developers I know.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - MaysonL 17y ago
    One who sold his startup, or has a big enough 401K, and feels like changing the world instead of making more money.
spot 17y ago
they found all the bugs?? but seriously, gates continues to maintain the fiction that open source = hobbyists not getting paid.
- almost 17y ago
  This letter was written quite some time ago, it's certainly not an attack on open source never mind a continuing one :p
  - spot 17y ago
    i know it's an old letter. what i said was based on what i heard gates say last month. he "continues" it today, in addition to doing it back then.
chriseppstein 17y ago
I've heard of a few companies that have this prerequisite, but only a few. I think open source contributions can tip the scales if you're up against a bunch of great candidates, but I don't think the business world works like you make it sound. In fact, I know lots of companies would actually shy away from open source contributors.
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  I know lots of companies would actually shy away from open source contributors. That's great--a perfect way to filter out companies that I would never want to work for.
- falsestprophet 17y ago
  I know lots of companies would actually shy away from open source contributors. Which companies? Why do you think they do?
  - joshz 17y ago
    I interviewed with one. A .NET web development studio, can't remember who specifically. They called the stuff I did "open-sourcy" and I could tell they looked down on it. I think it's the perception that cheap programmers use cheap tools, produce cheap code and are low quality.
    - TwoSheds 17y ago
      I see a significant difference between the .Net and Java developer cultures. It would be hard for me to believe that a Java shop would behave according to your description.

RevRal 17y ago

The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour. I once calculated my per hour wage from the work I did. About $1.50 Hang in there Bill!

staunch 17y ago
His $2/hour in 1976 is ~$8/hour in 2009 dollars.

blhack 17y ago

You guys laugh... Keep in mind that, at this point, microsoft was pretty much nothing... Here was a guy that built something with the intent to sell it, and people said "too bad". Of course he was upset about that. Now, should he have been philanthropic enough to have just given it away to the community? Maybe, but it doesn't really matter...he coded it, and he did so thinking he would be able to sell it. I equate those that copied BASIC then to the people that use adblock now. No, they're not really harming the author, but it is a bit discourteous. I think he was just trying to illustrate that "C'mon, guys...I worked really hard on this...I'm not suing you, but just please buy it instead :)"

CamperBob 17y ago
That's funny, I equate someone who uses intrusive ads on his website to someone who writes a free BASIC interpreter that stops after every 12 lines and PRINTs an ad to my console. If you're going to put something out there, free or otherwise, it's your problem to make sure that it's fit for my purpose.
- tptacek 17y ago
  If it's not fit for your purposes, fine. Don't use it.
  - CamperBob 17y ago
    If it's not fit for my purpose, then I'm somewhat less than interested in hearing you whine about how I didn't pay for it, or about how I used AdBlock to get what value I could out of it. You're not entitled to my money, and I'm not entitled to your content. The difference is, though, I didn't dangle my wallet on the Internet with the intent of wasting everybody's time.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      It's funny to see people getting self righteous about evading the intent of content owners. I'm not entitled to your wallet. But if you leave it on the table in my office...

thwarted 17y ago

The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour. This was an early version "I did it, I should get paid for it" feeling of entitlement. If your intent is to make serious money, why would you spend your time doing something that ultimately paid only $2/hr? Why are you trying to sell to people who are unwilling or unable to pay for the product or service? These sound like an obvious recipe for failure. Fortunately for Microsoft, the deals they did that gave them a captive business audience who wanted to pay for DOS, as it became the defacto standard, this ranting was later moot. And now Microsoft offers deep discounts and free stuff just to get you to use their products (for various business and marketing reasons).

Dilpil 17y ago
It is one thing to make a product no one wants and complain about making no money. Expressing dissapointment over not making money off of a product because it is universally stolen is a reasonable sentiment.
- thwarted 17y ago
  It's reasonable to complain. It's also reasonable, and I'd like to think expected, that if you created something that you can't get people to pay for, and they are stealing it, you'd get out of the business of providing that specific thing that can be stolen, or you invest in copy protection (which is a losing game anyway). Eventually Microsoft did get out of the business of trying to sell to hobbyists. He acknowledges that it wasn't universally stolen: the income was approximately $2/hr. If it was universally stolen, the income would have been $0/hr. But what he was missing was that it was universally wanted, there was a demand for it. This means he didn't set a price that the market was willing or able to bear, and the market told him the price that it was willing to bear. One way to adjust prices in the face of piracy is to take the total income divided by the total number of users (this is an iterative process, because this might not be immediately measurable). Considering what people had to go through to obtain copies on the Altair (making copies of paper tapes), the price set ($500 for the standalone version according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists ; approx $1900 in 2009 dollars) was way too high considering the effort of copying. At some lower price point, the effort of copying is too much for the price set. While it's nice to be able set whatever price you want and think you're going to get it, that isn't the case. And banking on being able to sell at some arbitrary price is folly. Because you'd be in the same situation if the people DIDN'T even bother to copy it in the first place, the only difference is that you get to complain that people are using it without paying. Charging $500 for something that is in high demand and is easily copyable, well, that's a huge mistake. The market is telling you there is interest, but you're not meeting the buyers, so they subvert you. And while it's unfortunate that all this effort and money and time was expended up front and now the bill comes due for, setting the wrong price, which discourages sales and encourages piracy, is bad market research. And Microsoft changed in that regard too, for a long time now Microsoft has been known for its marketing juggernaut.

jacquesm 17y ago

So, nothing changed in all that time. Micro-Soft found out the hard way that hobbyists are 'cheap'. And managed to sell a veritable fortune of software to nicely locked in businesses. Meanwhile the 'hobbyists' slowly grew in numbers until they outnumbered the 'professionals' (and plenty of them were professionals during the day and 'hobbyists' in the evenings and weekends). And then the web happened, and Microsoft blinked and open source took it and ran with it. And now, because of that they're facing the first real competition since their inception. Google would not have happened if it hadn't been for linux, and Sun and SGI would still be in business as well. The world is changing, rapidly. Let's hope it changes fast enough.

btilly 17y ago
The bit about "Microsoft blinked" is more complicated than that. The period where they blinked and Linux took off was one where they were distracted by a US anti-trust case. Then when they got ready to come back in force there was a European anti-trust case with large enough fines to actually get their attention.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  From the history of microsoft in wikipedia: "On, May 26, 1995, Bill Gates sent the "Internet Tidal Wave" memorandum to Microsoft executives. The memo described Netscape with their Netscape Navigator as a "new competitor 'born' on the Internet." The memo outlines Microsoft's failure to grasp the Internet's importance, and in it Gates assigns "the Internet this highest level of importance" from then on." Read it for yourself at: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/exhibits/20.pdf http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/exhibits/20.pdf That's an exhibit from the lawsuit, which came much later.
  - btilly 17y ago
    The key question is, "When did open source take it and run with it?" After 1995 Microsoft came back, quickly won the browser war, and was putting together their server strategy. I argue that 1998 was the key year. Here are some highlights. In Feb the term Open Source was created. In April Netscape open sourced Mozilla. In May the Microsoft antitrust case began. In June IBM announced support for Apache. In July both Oracle and Informix announced support for Linux. And in the same month we got the first truly mainstream press coverage of Linux that I'm aware of, Forbes Magazine ran Linus on the cover, and had a good article discussing open source. (Wonderful goodwill that they later destroyed with their horrible SCO reporting.) I submit that had the lawsuit not started in May, then we would not have had the big announcements from Informix, Oracle and IBM. And during that explosion we would have seen dirty tricks from Microsoft to leverage their browser market into controlling the server as well.

dkeskar 17y ago

One ventures into a market hoping it would be profitable. It does not, so one tries to "train the customers". That letter probably didn't increase sales. But this guy and his company managed to hang around making revenues until they were approached as a partner by some large company that knew how to get customers to pay through their noses.

ScottWhigham 17y ago

It stands the test of time - 33 years later, developers are still complaining about the same things. I found that rather amusing - so much has changed yet much is still the same. If you believe anything out of the BSA, last year was a record year with more than $50 billion in software piracy: http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/index.html http://global.bsa.org/globalpiracy2008/index.html

nkassis 17y ago
I don't believe anything they say so... how much was really stolen?

alexgartrell 17y ago

At the end of the day, someone stole his stuff, so he got pissed. He over-generalized and argued the wrong point, and hindsight kind of made it so he made an ass of himself. That said, there really are very few people alive who haven't gotten mad and made an ass of themselves at some point, so we should probably forgive this "Open Letter to Hobbyists". (I saw Gates talk when we opened a new building on Campus and someone asked him about the huge piracy rates in China so he brought up this letter in particular and said he's since learned to not get bent out of shape about it)

tomjen2 17y ago

And now you can download the lastest version of basic directly from Microsoft completely legal. Oh well.

lurkinggrue 17y ago

Didn't the hobbyists respond this way: LOL! Not sure if I am remembering my history correctly.