Open Letter To Hobbyists - Open Letter

Open Letter

"Micro-Soft" received a $30 to $60 royalty for each copy of BASIC that MITS sold. At the end of 1975, MITS was shipping a thousand computers a month but BASIC was selling in the low hundreds. There were additional software projects that required more resources. The MITS 8-inch floppy disk system was about to be released as was the MITS 680B computer based on the Motorola 6800. A high school friend of Allen and Gates, Ric Weiland, was hired to convert the 8080 BASIC to the 6800 microprocessor. Gates would attempt to explain the cost of developing software to hobbyist community.

David Bunnell, Computer Notes Editor, was sympathetic to Gates's position. He wrote in the September 1975 issue that "customers have been ripping off MITS software".

Now I ask you--does a musician have the right to collect the royalty on the sale of his records or does a writer have the right to collect the royalty on the sale of his books? Are people who copy software any different than those who copy records and books?

Gates' letter restated what Bunnell wrote in September and Roberts wrote in October. However, the tone of his letter was those hobbyists were stealing from him, not from a corporation.

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?

One of the principal targets of the letter was the Homebrew Computer Club and a copy would be sent to the club. The letter would also appear in Computer Notes. To ensure the letter would be noticed, Dave Bunnell sent the letter via special delivery mail to every major computer publication in the country.

In the letter Gates mentions they are writing APL for the 8080 and 6800 microprocessors. The APL programming language was in vogue with some computer scientists in the 1970s. The language uses a character set based on the Greek alphabet that required special terminals. Most hobbyist terminals did not display lower case letters much less Greek symbols. Gates was enamored with APL but Allen did not think they could sell this product. The interest in APL project faded and software was never written.