Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software issomething to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it getpaid?Gates went on to explain that this "theft" of software was holding back talentedprogrammers from writing for machines like the Altair. "Who can afford to doprofessional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3 man-years intoprogramming, finding all the bugs, documenting his product and distributing forfree?"Though fairly impassioned, the letter, carefully edited by Bunnell, was far from ascreed. But all hell broke loose in the hacker community. Ed Roberts, thoughagreeing philosophically with Gates, couldn't help but notice the bad feelings, andwas upset that Gates hadn't consulted him before publishing the letter. TheSouthern California Computer Society threatened to sue Gates for callinghobbyists "thieves." Gates received between three and four hundred letters, onlyfive or six containing the voluntary payment he suggested that owners of piratedBASIC send him. Many of the letters were intensely negative. Hal Singer, editorof the Micro-8 Newsletter, which received Gates' letter via special delivery, wrotethat "the most logical action was to tear the letter up and forget about it."But the "software flap," as it came to be known, could not easily be forgotten.When MIT hackers were writing software and leaving it in the drawer for others towork on, they did not have the temptation of royalties. Slug Russell's Spacewar,for instance, had no market (there were only fifty PDP-ls made, and theinstitutions that owned them would hardly spend money to buy a space game).With the growing number of computers in use (not only Altairs but others as well),a good piece of software became something which could make a lot of money ifhackers did not consider it well within their province to pirate the software. Noone seemed to object to a software author getting something for his work butneither did the hackers want to let go of the idea that computer programs belongedto everybody. It was too much a part of the hacker dream to abandon.Steve Dompier thought that Bill Gates was merely whining. "Ironically, Billcomplaining about piracy didn't stop anything. People still believed, 'If you got it,you could run it.' It was like taping music off the air. BASIC had spread all overthe country, all over the world. And it helped Gates the fact that everybody hadAltair BASIC and knew how it worked and how to fix it meant that when othercomputer companies came on line and needed a BASIC, they went to Gates'company. It became a de facto standard."