Yesterday, 20 years ago, RMS posted this to Usenet:
Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it.
And he actually did it. The Linux that half the world runs on today is the product of the effort that he started back then.
What about the other half of the world? It has a different philosophy. This is Bill Gates’ famous Open Letter to Hobbyists, sent on February 3, 1976:
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these “users” never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? 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. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don’t do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn’t make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. 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?
Arthur Van De Lay
If someone copied \”Feed on Feeds\” and distributed it in some way that violated the license that you put on it (like charged people for it), wouldn\’t you be ticked off?
Same thing with Bill G.
steve
These are just two different points of view.
It\’s perfectly reasonable to create something, hide the details of how it works, and ask for payment in return for use of that thing. That\’s the closed source model. RMS thinks this is morally wrong.
It\’s also reasonable to create something, and give it away to everyone, and not just the thing itself, but all the information about how it works so others can redistribute it and modify it. This is the free software model. Bill and other industry leaders have said this model is actually \”wrong\”. They say it will lead to the downfall of our economy.
I think they\’re both right about the benefits of their own world views, and both wrong about, or at least overstating, the problems with the opposite ones.
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