AN OPEN LETTER TO HOBBYISTS

By William Henry Gates III

February 3, 1976

An Open Letter to Hobbyists

To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?

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? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.

What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.

I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.

Bill Gates

General Partner, Micro-Soft

ON THE OTHER HAND

(Sorry: this was in an email, no link.)

As usual, though, it killed me that from each hour-long interview, we could air only a few sentences in the finished 8-minute segment. So I thought I'd share a greater slice of one of the transcripts with you, my Internet-savvy readers. The subject is Blake Ross, who began working at Netscape at the tender age of 14. By 19, he had co-created Firefox: a free, highly regarded, open-source Web browser that, in its very short life, has been downloaded 100 million times, in the process stealing over ten percent of the browser market away from Microsoft. He's now on leave from Stanford, where I met him in his studio apartment. DP: So what, exactly, is Firefox? BR: Firefox is a Web browser. Kind of a competitor for Internet Explorer, but made for the average person. Made for people who don't want to spend all day cursing at the computer. We want you to surf the Web without worrying about spyware, viruses, or pop-up ads. DP: And how were you, a bunch of volunteers, able to do this when the best and the brightest, highest paid programmers from Microsoft could not? BR: First of all, they dropped the ball. Internet Explorer hasn't been updated since 2001. And so when Microsoft basically disbanded the Internet Explorer team, the Web started to outpace the Web browser. We guide our development by what our users want, not by the dollar. You know, no other factors come into play except these features that people are asking for. So basically I go home and I say, "Hey, Mom, you know, what's still wrong with the internet? What's bothering you?" And she tells me. DP: You ask your mom? BR: Well, she'll yell at me. And I'll say, "Mom, calm down. What's wrong?" And then I'll fix that. DP: I wonder why Bill Gates's mom couldn't do the same thing? BR: Yeah (laughs). DP: How does the open source movement work, and what was your role? BR: Firefox is an open-source product, the result of tens of thousands of volunteers all over the world. People in Europe can be coordinating with people in the United States, can be coordinating with people in Africa. All putting the user input into this browser. It's really a global effort. My role, along with another teammate at Netscape, was--we looked at this Mozilla browser and we said, "We have great technology here. But nobody's using it. What's the problem there?" And talking to other users, we found out that it was just too hard for them to use. So we just stripped everything out of Mozilla. And we redesigned features and the entire user interface to streamline everything-- to make it as simple as possible. DP: So are you getting rich? BR: I'm not making a dime off of Firefox. But it's enough for me to get an email from a grandfather in Mississippi telling me that he can finally get on the Web and communicate with his grandchildren. Of course, Firefox itself opened up a world of possibilities for me personally. You know, I'm working on a start-up right now. It's much easier to get funded. It's much easier to get my name out there than it used to be. DP: What I can't understand is, when I was a teenager, I had more than enough other stuff like social life and learning to drive and going to school and everything else. How are you able to do something of this magnitude while you're 14, 15, 16? BR: Basically, I had to sacrifice any semblance of a normal social life while I was in high school. I just kind of gave up, you know, parties and going out with friends. All of it went toward this project. I think it's paying off now. DP: All of the people that we're talking for this story started in their early teens. And all of them made their marks in Internet-related fields. Is the Internet what's allowing very young people to achieve extraordinary things? Or could smart, ambitious people have made their mark in some other area at that young an age? BR: Yeah, the Internet is really the great equalizer. It really levels the playing field. There's absolutely nothing else stopping me from writing a great piece of software and just putting it out there on the Web for anyone to use. And it doesn't matter if it came from a 50- year-old experienced software developer or it came from a 19-year-old kid in California. If it's good software, people will use it. DP: Has your youth been in any way a liability? BR: I don't consider myself young! I'm worried about kids coming in and just totally replacing me. I'm actually frightened to see what the generation after me comes up with. The next generation is these kids that have grown up on the Internet. That are turning in their homework via email in first grade. DP: Isn't it true that part of Firefox's security reputation has to do with the fact that it is so small, that it's not worth these hackers to write an exploit for such a small market? Don't you think that when FireFox is 60 percent of the Web, the great eye of the virus writers will turn to it? BR: I think the eye has already turned to it, actually. We're speeding towards 60 million downloads note: the tally is now over 100 million]. That's plenty big enough base for any virus writer I know. So they're trying. They're just not succeeding. DP: Let's say your new start-up is a huge success. And you become the--you know, people are calling you the New Bill Gates. I've seen this in print. BR: Me too. DP: So what if you became the New Bill Gates? What would you do differently? BR: Actually, the funny thing is that people assume that I'm gonna be in the computer industry forever, and I'm not sure that's the case. I think I've got a couple more years in me in the computer industry. I've actually had these secret ambitions to write either films or novels. I think life's too short to do anything for too long. Join a discussion of David Pogue's columns. This week's Pogue's Posts blog. Visit David Pogue on the Web at DavidPogue.com.

WICH IS GOING TO BRING ME TO: THE FOURTH TURNING (NEXT)