It's amazing, and frankly stupid, how many people try to justify theft. Sorry guys, regardless of what utopian ideals of OSS you have, and I have them too, you must respect the creator's wishes. If they ask you to pay for the software, then you MUST pay for the software. Anything else is theft.
Let's say you are a freelance developer. Do you think for one second that it would be ok for your clients to let you do all the work, then take your code and not pay you? I mean, knowledge should be free, right? Screw the fact that you built the software with the expectation of getting paid for your hard work.
It's one thing to create something with the intention of sharing it with the world. It's an entirely different thing for anybody to justify stealing what you have done.
> Sorry guys, regardless of what utopian ideals of OSS you have, and I have them too, you must respect the creator's wishes. If they ask you to pay for the software, then you MUST pay for the software. Anything else is theft.
In a legal sense, this is patently false in every country I know of. Even ignoring the point others have made that theft is not copyright infringement under the law, the assertion is false. Every country I know of has exceptions to copyright law. In the US it's called Fair Use, in many Commonwealth nations it's called Fair Dealing, in Germany it's just called "Limitations on Copyright" (Schranken des Urheberrechts). In every case, the creator's wishes are not absolute.
But more interesting to me is that we have taken a purely legal concept that was completely new just 303 years ago and turned it into a broadly accepted moral imperative. Those with a vested interest have succeeded in tying this new legal concept to an ancient moral wrong, that of theft. And they have been so successful at this, that many people would dismiss the distinction as semantic quibbling. To me, this is a fascinating sociological and philosophical phenomenon.
For anyone else who is interested in this cultural history, I highly recommend "Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars" by William Patry.
Re: copyright being 303 years old. First, there were developments in copyright prior to the English copyright act. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law#Early_.... Printing in England was done by a royally chartered monopoly from 1557. Printing was regulated by an order of the Star Chamber in 1637 and the Licensing Press Act of 1679 before the Statute of Anne introduced copyrights in 1710. So basically contemporaneously with the widespread adoption of technology in England that enabled copies of written works to be quickly made, regulation has existed to protect works from copying. Copyright itself has existed for 300 of the 500 or so years since printed books became common in England.
I agree that it's not sensible to link copyright to the ancient moral crime of theft. It's more sensible to link it to the very old if not ancient moral crime of trespass: http://www.slesher.com/trespass.html.
A copyright owner's moral right is basically the right to exclude--the right to control with whom one shares his original work.
Good thing I'm not a complete idiot, or I wouldn't know or understand fair use. People tend to forget that fair use is limited in its scope. Unfortunately, a lot of people's idea of fair use is, "I want it, so I'm gonna take it." It IS a moral imperative. It IS stealing. I don't care how you sugarcoat it. In high-school and the first part of my college life, I pirated music and applications with impunity. I justified it every way I could, but at the end of the day, I realized I was stealing -- regardless of what nuanced legal argument I could come up with. It drives me crazy when people say "it's not stealing, it's just copyright infringement," like that magically makes what they are doing better.
> It IS stealing. I don't care how you sugarcoat it.
Surely you understand that it’s possible for people who aren’t you to look at the same facts, and come to a different conclusion? Not because they’re fooling themselves, but simply because people of good heart are allowed to have differences of opinion.
> It IS stealing. I don't care how you sugarcoat it.
If you're going to alter the definition of "stealing" to cover things that aren't stealing, then why stop there? Why not call copyright infringement "arson" or "murder" too?
Making an unlicensed replica of another person's non-rival good is not the same thing as depriving another person of a rival good in their possession. You can even hold both to be worthy of legal censure without having to advance this disingenuous prevarication.
If you're in favor of strict IP law, do you not see how playing these semantic games actually undermines your credibility and therefore your argument?
The thing is, law is nothing more than codified morality. I do believe, in a court of law, that we should make a distinction between theft and copyright. Several Supreme Court justices agree that this is the case. However, when looking and the very core of the issue, absent legal codification, I'm still taking something that isn't mine, regardless of whether or not it was merely a copy. That is where I am coming from. Responsible adults shouldn't need to split legal hairs, we should recognize that we are, at its core, taking what is not ours to take. There is a legal distinction, but not a moral one.
The law is significantly divergent from morality, codified or otherwise, and is often itself immoral.
But, that said, when looking at the issue from a purely moral perspective, the difference becomes even more clearly illuminated: again, making a replica of someone else's thing is utterly different from taking their thing away from them. This isn't a hair split in the slightest: the key component of harm that makes theft immoral just isn't present with copying.
But you're not compensating them for the time they spent making it. They've spent time to make this thing, and you're taking a copy of this thing without spending a dime for their effort. It's a service. A labor. That you're not paying for.
So? You're not entitled for compensation for the time you spend making anything. Your effort is neither a service nor labor done one anyone else's behalf; it's a speculative capital investment, and your risk to bear. If I spend millions of dollars developing a new type of camera film in 2000, and digital cameras make film cameras obsolete before I earn a penny of revenue, that's too bad, but no one owes me anything. Spent a billion bucks building new houses in 2008? Sorry to hear it, but you don't get to tear down other people's houses to restore the value of yours.
And if you say that copying is different from anything else that might diminish your return because you think you already had some inherent right to control whether other people make their own replicas of your stuff, then you're begging the question; your lack of ROI can't itself be the justification for copyright if you make such an argument.
Technological innovation in a competitive free market has nothing to do with the original point. Meh, I'm over it. At the end of the day, I feel that copyright infringement is stealing, and other people don't. I am fine with a legal distinction, but I see no such distinction from a layman's moral standpoint.
But laws and policy aren't about feelings; they rely on consistent and precise definitions of terms.
If anything here is a strawman, it's your insistence on equivocating two behaviors which are substantively and observably different in their intentions, methods, and effects, in order to apply the moral censure earned by one disingenuously to the other.
If you want to make a meaningful argument against copyright infringement in its own right, please do so; I'd welcome the productive discourse. But arguing against it by calling it calling it by the name of another thing entirely - without bothering to establish a coherent connection between the two - doesn't constitute a valid argument in the slightest.
Further, my previous comment involved nothing resembling a strawman at all; you offered the position that copyright ought to be protected in order to ensure that the time and labor input into the initial design of a creative work would always yield a return for the creator, and I replied by pointing out that these are capital expenditures, to which no one in any field is entitled a guaranteed return at all.
Do you seriously regard as a strawman my classification of the advance investments necessary to open a factory and the advance investments necessary to produce a film both as capital expenditures, but simultaneously claim that your equivocation of copyright infringement with stealing is a robust and substantive assertion?
> I see no such distinction from a layman's moral standpoint
Then why do so many "laymen" actively assert this distinction?
Again, I have to point out that your methods of discourse actively reduce the credibility of your position.
It's amazing, and frankly stupid, how quickly you slid from piracy to OSS.
OSS has nothing to do with piracy. If I licensed my project MIT, sharing it is not piracy. OSS platforms do not have thriving piracy ecosystems because there is plenty of OSS software for them. In my experience, people who believe in OSS are the most likely to champion using a legal OSS alternative to pirating some widely-used proprietary software.
I've released plenty of OSS myself, and I agree with what you are saying. Unfortunately, the OSS movement is also co-opted by people who are willing to steal to get what they want, and use ideological mantras of the OSS movement to justify their actions.
They can't force you to pay for the software after they have already decided to release the code under an open license. As a high-profile example, Red Hat sells Red Hat Enterprise Linux (with various support options). But they release release (most of) their code under various open-source licenses, and the Centos project builds a binary-compatible OS with only the trademarked Red Hat stuff changed.
Theft vs Copyright infringement is all semantics anyway. Like you said, if the software is for sale and you take it and use it without paying, it's wrong, regardless of what you call it.
I don't think anyone would flatly come out and say that a developer doesn't deserve to be paid for his/her work. Yet when you use software without paying for it, you are depriving the developer of his income.
The utopian ideal that is relevant here is the ideal that information should never be considered property. So you can't properly claim to be one of the utopian idealists while using the words "theft" and "stealing" here.
We all understand what is being discussed here. We don't need to argue semantics over what it means to obtain something you didn't pay for (but should have).
It seems that the tech community stands adamantly behind the "copyright infringement isn't theft" mantra but in reality the moral crime is taking something you weren't entitled to. Our actions don't really seem to consider the state of the original product making the difference between "theft" and "copyright infringement" because it is not concerning to us. For the developer/distributor/publisher/artist or whomever is expecting a cut from sales the result is the same: they lost a part of their wage.
Admittedly I've done my share of piracy but now that I spend a good chunk of my free time releasing software or writing code I have stopped; it feels kind of shitty to see something taken without any regard for your hardships. Hell, as a result I even go out of my way to make sure developers are paid their dues by purchasing almost any app I use. If I come to expect others to pay/donate for my effort it is quite hypocritical to not do the same as a consumer.
I do not advocate piracy, and do believe that people should be paid for their work. However, you are wrong. Theft means that the original owner no longer has the item stolen from them. Copying something from them most definitely leaves them with the original. That is one way in which piracy is not like theft. I would much rather someone download a copy of my code, than grab all my drives, make a copy, erase them, then return the drives. What you said is "theft is wrong" && "piracy is wrong" => "Piracy must be theft". The trouble is, you cannot apply the same concepts to physical and digital world. Once again, not arguing that pirating software or other content is good, just that it is not theft.
Secondly, and this is a point that I don't think is discussed much, piracy to me is an effect of market value. For example big music labels will argue that if I distribute a Britney Spears MP3 on a file sharing network, that they lose $0.99 * # of potential buyers. This is false. The market value of this piece of content is much lower. People would not pay for it if the only way to get it was through, say, iTunes. Basically, someone might want it for free, might consider if for cheap ($0.10/song), but not want it for the price set by the market.
Having read threads on this subject for 20 years, the same old tired points get brought up as if they matter whatsoever. Nobody cares about the semantic arguments. People are arguing that you should not pirate software and that if you do you should be viewed by your peers as someone on par with a thief since you have the same moral code as a thief does, you just choose to perform immoral acts in a medium that is most beneficial for you (and in many ways, less risky.) Nobody is arguing about the economic harm or the philosophical difference between theft and copyright infringement with regards to their effect on scarcity of goods.
The point is if you pirate software you are committing a moral act that, while economically may not be comparable to theft, reveals the same integrity and character as that of a common thief. Just like you can not "copyright infringe" a widget from to someone who built it, you cannot "steal" software, by definition. The only reason software pirates do not "steal" software is not because they are good-hearted citizens who simply draw the line between theft and copyright infringement in terms of immoral things they permit themselves to do. The reason software pirates do not "steal" software is because it is impossible to do so. I think if there were a way to copy software that deprived others of it, yet still had the same likelihood of getting caught as piracy does today, piracy would still occur as much as it does now. And the reason software pirates do not steal physical goods on top of software is because the risk/reward equation is completely different, not because they somehow have a deep philosophical aversion to affecting the scarcity of goods. People want shit and they do not want to pay for it. Some people who have this feeling decide they are going to take actions they shouldn't. We should hold opinions of these these people equally (though not necessarily treat them the same under the law.)
Except that it's not purely semantics. The fact that the physical analogy breaks down pretty severely should lend intuition to the fact that our judgments about pirates should differ from those about thieves. Are all of the following equivalent moral wrongs?
1. Copying software, changing attribution, and selling it as your own.
2. Acquiring software you would otherwise have to pay for, and being able to afford it (or using it for economic gain).
3. Acquiring software you would otherwise have to pay for, and being unable to afford it.
4. Using a cracked copy of software that you have paid for, in order to circumvent a restriction that impairs your use of it and which the vendor is unwilling to address.
I think few of us would consider #3 a heinous crime if it was done by someone in order to train himself on industry-standard software (e.g. Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc.), which he would then be able to apply at a job where the software was paid for.
That's not to deny there are plenty of people who pirate just because they want free stuff without paying for it. But that doesn't mean we should all take our lessons from Inspector Javert.
Do you then think that these people of disreputable character regularly steal from their local grocery stores? Or at least, that they have no moral qualms about doing that, as it's the same as copyright infringement, and the only reason they don't is the increased risk?
The problem is the price is not set by the market, it is set by the record label and significant arm twisting. Support your favorite bands by sending them cheques if you obtain their album. The RIAA is the problem.
Also check out Band Camp for new unsigned artists. Great service and IMHO the future of the "record" industry.
Honest question: how would you set the market value of a digital good? I have a very limited understanding of economics, but it seems to be that balancing the supply/demand equations when supply is infinite (for, say, a song, movie, music video, etc.) becomes rather difficult.
How would you set the market value of a physical copy of a digital good?
Music CDs are sold for roughly $10-$20 USD. The actual cost of making the physical CD is around $1. People seem much more agreeable to accept a $9-$19 markup on a physical CD than on a digital album, which costs $0 to copy but ostensibly has the same cost to produce otherwise.
Well, if there is scarcity (i.e.: supply is somehow limited), then the market value is where supply and demand curves cross. In other words, I'd throw a bunch of CD's into the market and let the price stabilize. That has nothing to do with how much it cost me to make it (the same way that the salary a doctor makes has nothing to do with how expensive the education was), but everything to do with opportunity cost: would I rather buy this CD or another. At least for spherical songs in vacuum.
I cannot do the same thing with digital goods since the supply is unlimited. I don't see how the market can settle using the old supply/demand paradigm. I can try to get a stable price by offering a "pay what you think it's worth" model, but that' no fun either.
In my experience, the market appears to have established an approximate range of fair prices for CDs in general, that does not appear to be based on how many copies have been pressed.
Obviously there are some major variations if too few copies were made and the publisher refuses to make more to meet demand (putting the CD "out of print"), or if many more were made than people want to buy and retailers need to clear out inventory.
But in general, if an artist produces a new CD, they could press 5 copies or 50,000 copies, and I would expect the selling price to be somewhere in that $10-$20 range or so, not because of the number of copies of that particular CD, but because of what the market expects CDs to cost.
Band Camp is great! I don't care enough about music per se to use it for its intended purpose, but I do get pointed from time to time to some groups who remix video game music. There's some pretty talented musicians on there even in esoteric genres.
We perhaps need a different term altogether because really it's not just copyright infringement either.
If you take something from me that is meant only for sale to others then it helps me absolutely zero that I still have it.
With copyright infringement, it used to mean selling cheap knock-offs of your work, including your work illegally into someone else's dime novel, etc. With digital copyright infringement people are literally selling or giving away the authentic item (i.e. the data). This is much closer to 'theft' than the old idea of copyright infringement.
You have a good point about market value but those are economic principles, not moral ones. It's like saying I only took a gumdrop instead of a pallet of candy bars, but either way it's still wrong.
> We perhaps need a different term altogether because really it's not just copyright infringement either.
Why does copyright infringement not work?
> If you take something from me that is meant only for sale to others then it helps me absolutely zero that I still have it.
That still does not make it equivalent to theft. If I somehow started distributing copies of your digital goods and made it impossible for you to distribute the originals, would you say that's worse than me only doing the former and not the latter?
> This is much closer to 'theft' than the old idea of copyright infringement.
No, it is not. From WikiPedia [1]: In common usage, theft is the taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it
In no way is pirating something fitting that definition. The only thing that piracy might deny you is potential profits, which are not property by any definition.
> You have a good point about market value but those are economic principles, not moral ones. It's like saying I only took a gumdrop instead of a pallet of candy bars, but either way it's still wrong.
I agree! Piracy is wrong. Does not matter how little or how much you do it, it ends up hurting someone.
Well, it's more complicated. For example, I currently have a song in my iTunes library that I bought from iTunes when they sold DRM encumbered audio. I bought it with an Apple ID I no longer have access to. iTunes refuses to recognize it in any way and I cannot decrypt it, but I did pay for it fair and square. Would it be amoral for me to download that song on a file sharing network? What if I had an LP that I bought in 1979 instead of an m4p file?
Copyright infringement is very different from theft.
First, if you copy one of my books, say from someone who bought it in pdf format from the O'Reilly site, you have not denied the owner access to his paid copy. You have not robbed anyone of a physical artifact with a measurable cost.
Second, such as act doesn't even rise to the status of "theft of service." It isn't like sneaking into another movie theater after watching the show you paid for. You are not taking up a physical seat.
At most you have committed a tort. The problem is these tiny torts have been criminalized. But that doesn't make them any more significant than they really are. How insignificant are they? So insignificant that simply by telling me you will write a review, I would give you a copy for free.
Quantify it: how was I damaged? If you lie to me just to get a free copy, how do I distinguish moral crime comitters from well-intentioned potential reviewers who never got around to it? How many of them should I pursue as thieves? What effect would that have on attracting reviewers?
Stamping "MORAL CRIME DOER" on the forehead of people who have taken something weightless, incrementally cost-less, and that is marketed by giving it away to people is like turning jaywalking into a felony.
The irony is that if copying my works was economically significant - if, say, I made an ERP system and a customer failed to pay maintenance fees - my recourse would be to sue them for the tort of not meeting a contractual obligation. The law already has a measure in place to prevent stupid cases: Is it worth suing over? If not, just move on.
I am not a legal expert but I do believe that "theft of service" can apply to the likes of, say, "stealing" cable service, even if it doesn't reduce the capacity of others to enjoy their cable service. FWIW.
How insignificant are they? So insignificant that simply by telling me you will write a review, I would give you a copy for free.
I would agree with that.
But if someone tells me, "I want a copy, but even though you are asking $5 per copy, I don't think it's worth anything at all. Give one to me for free." ... I would not be so quick to hand over a copy in that case, and, based on anecdotal conversations with others, I suspect that is closer to the mentality of a lot of folks who are committing the trivial crime of copyright infringement.
Where shall I send it? I'll even inscribe a hard copy for you. That's a $44.99 retail value.
More seriously, there is a lot of evidence that promotional copies sell books. You could buy, or ask for a promotional copy of Guy Kawasaki's book about making books. It's about self-publishing, but his experiences with promoting and marketing books apply to any book where the publisher's marketing budget is very limited.
There are some other effects I can count on: That readers of HN are fairly likely to not bother to take something they won't use, because they value their own time. You are only a hypothetical pirate, and your question is hypothetical, too. In the real world, piracy behaves much like promotion.
But, you may be thinking, what about entertainment products?
It's been shown over and over that "pirates" are also top-ranked among paying customers. Is there a real-world case that piracy reduces revenue? If you get past the hypothetical cases, it's much harder to say so.
I don't disagree at all. I've given away copies of my own work, both in digital and physical formats.
I guess my question is, where do you draw the line? You said, there is a lot of evidence that promotional copies sell books. Sure. But if you give them all away, what do you sell? (Assuming that you want to sell any at all.)
"Sure. But if you give them all away, what do you sell?"
The anecdotal evidence Guy Kawasaki bases his advice for self-publishers on is that giving away books is always good. My publishers have signing events at conferences and give away case-loads of my current book at these events. Amazon sales always spike afterward.
In practical terms, that tipping point seems to be very far out there.
"...as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours" - Bill Gates [1]
Yep, that's exactly what victims of theft feel. When my car was stolen last year, I thought "Well it could be worse, they could have stolen someone else's car". Because the more people steal my stuff, the more money I make, right?
Theft is too strong a word, because nothing is taken away from the company who makes the product. The moral imperative here doesn't come from actual harm to an individual, it comes from the notion that someone should be rewarded for their hard work if others benefit from it. Which is much weaker. If someone copies something they would never have paid for otherwise, then there is very little harm done indeed.
Don't get me wrong, I like the notion that it is morally right for people to be rewarded for their hard work if it benefits others. However, if we're going to enforce it, shouldn't we start by trying to stop the exploitation of poor people before we go all nuts over sob stories from software giants, record companies and movie studios?
Equating a lesser crime (copyright infringement) with a greater crime (theft) diminishes the weight of the greater crime[1].
To use a ridiculous example, if you say that taking a picture of a statue is the same as stealing the statue, any accusations you make of theft will not be taken very seriously.
[1] My basis for this claim is that taking $40 that I already have is worse than not giving me $40 for a license to software that I wrote.
Except, the hobbyist community back then was even further removed from commercialisation than the open source market is today.
The hobbyist community back then was based around clubs of people sharing their achievements; the computers they built, software they'd written and any neat tricks they'd invented (like using the electrical interference of the original Altar to play a tune on a radio http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgYhVnmeWrk ). The hobbyist community was very much driven by sharing ideas and code.
This is why people got annoyed at that letter. It not only flew against everything the community was built around, but also made some heavy criticisms about their members as well.
When you review that letter in the context of the community is was directed at and the time it was written, it seems even more out of place than it does today.
It's a pity that the then Micro-soft did not have copy protection technology - if they had, they might never have established such a strong foothold in the market, and the history of computing would have been quite different.
> ...in 1998 during a candid moment in front of an audience at the University of Washington acknowledged the problem with enforcing software copyrights in the developing world:
> Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though, and as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
Microsoft moved to a business model where they received royalties paid directly from the OEMs. And I suppose, BASIC was a teaser for MS's more advanced developer tools.
My guess is that "Yeah, me too" posts rarely add anything to the conversation - sorry, I'm being blunt here, but that's the way HN rolls. If you find a post humorous, just upvote and move on. You'll get your chance to crack a joke in due time.
The contrast is with ten-comment-long Redditesque variants-on-a-theme threads, which I personally enjoy - on Reddit. Here, I'd rather cut to the chase with insightful commentary.
... and as a result poor Bill has lived in total poverty, only to die of scurvy in a slum. His business died with out trace and he never been heard of since. A tragic story. Yes, bad hobbyists.
Point being, despite all the piracy, there is still some money to be made. The complaint is that such folk are not making enough money. See, Bill should be twice or 3 times as rich. Man, he's really losing out.
Of course then we have to deal with the age old assumption that every person with a pirated copy would have paid for it. Which is, er, optimistic, at best. IMHO, the loss is negligible. All they the copyright owner gets in reality is the satisfaction that not so many people use their product, but those who do pay.
I'm not that happy at hitting Bill with this as he is one of the filthy rich people who actually uses his accumulated wealth for good causes. Which is ideal really.
The great philanthropic era was a result of the robber barons. The idea that we might enter a new era of such figures is only a sign of the grossly disproportionate wealth scales that damage our societies.
It is a despotic idea that society must endure the deprivations of these individuals or corporation only to be rewarded with narrow visions of a better future world through the myopic eyes of the DuPont's, Gates', or Carnegie's of the world. These "great" men robbed, captured, or monopolized vast tracts of our communal resources in their acquisition of said wealth
(edit: I accidentally an 'r')
Yes! Next time you visit the Frick collection in New York City (you really should) think about the bloody repression of the Homestead strike [0].
I really think that the likes of Gates, Frick, Carnegie, Rockefeller or the more recent Jim Simons. Should have been taxed at a much much steeper rate, just like Buffett proposed [1], instead of waiting for their kindness of heart.
By replacing philanthropy with taxation we get the democratic process to choose what is the best way to spend this money, instead of their however enlightened agenda.
So we should tax away Thiel's money so instead of Space X we get... more ethanol subsidies? Or we should tax away Cameron's money so instead of asteroid mining we get higher pensions for government union workers?
What kind of world do you live in that allows you this kind of democratic idealism?
As our population gets older, the priorities of our democracies will reflect that. More and more government spending will go towards risk-averse projects - mostly medical subsidy. The only truly radical innovation will come from eccentric billionaires.
Well first of all Thiel's venture is a company not philantropy…
But hell yeah, more pensions, universal healthcare, maybe more spending on education (talking about public school not 40k$/year colleges) are definitely a better way to spend money than radical innovation of eccentric billionaires.
Moreover what we're talking about here is not turning billionaires into mere millionaires, but taxing people who can afford to donate 95% of their fortune 30% instead of 15%. That still leaves ample room for eccentric innovation. Yours is a false dichotomy.
The United States is one of the biggest spenders in the world on K-12 education. How much more money do you want to spend on a broken system?
The unions get much better pensions than the rest of us. And their political machines own the state capitals. How much higher should they go?
The United States spends far more money per person on health care than other countries. How much more do you want to spend?
This year, the top capital gains tax rate in California went up 52%. That's a substantial bite on innovation to ensure public workers get gold-plated defined-benefit pensions.
America's government may be inefficient, but it is not stingy.
>The United States is one of the biggest spenders in the world on K-12 education. How much more money do you want to spend on a broken system?
Certainly spending less won't fix it.
>The unions get much better pensions than the rest of us. And their political machines own the state capitals. How much higher should they go?
Extend those rights to non unionized workers.
>The United States spends far more money per person on health care than other countries. How much more do you want to spend?
I want to spend less by having universal public healthcare.
>This year, the top capital gains tax rate in California went up 52%. That's a substantial bite on innovation to ensure public workers get gold-plated defined-benefit pensions.
Capital tax gains mostly affect more affluent households. I'm willing to bet that even with this rate, taxation is regressive in the US.
Part of this subthread discusses how Bill Gates started out in life and how much he has prospered since he wrote the open letter. Just on that point, it might be of interest to check an online post "Why Bill Gates is Richer than You" (more than a decade old, before Gates got involved in philanthropy full time) about how he made his money.
Note that I have not fact-checked this at all, so if anyone has any factual corrections or updates (which could come from one of the published biographical writings about Gates), I would be glad to hear them.
"What most users want, though, is a cheap simple device that lets them collaborate with others... Thus the market for computing may in the end boil down to simple stuff to be used by consumers and reliable stuff to be operated by professional IT staff. Windows is way too complex for most consumers and difficult to justify on the server side when you can run Linux for free."
Bill Gates sure is a great marketer. Igniting this issue in such direct way made people pay attention. No wonder he was able to build MS into what it was.
Its just a letter complaining about a product being pirated. It only shocked people because the idea of end-consumers paying for software was novel then.
Piracy is not the same as "open technologies" in any way. In fact, the latter prevents the former (if I settle on GIMP instead of pirating Photoshop...)
If you read it carefully it's not just about piracy. It's against sharing (which in open source happens without any piracy). His basic idea - sharing prevents good software from being written. I.e. only closed paid model can be incentive to create good software. It's the cornerstone idea of Microsoft and is very in line with their historic hatred towards open technologies which they always saw as a threat (and obviously not because of piracy). It also is in line with their aggressive approach to enforcing patents and copyrights.
It pissed off seemingly everyone in the community and seemed to be against the spirit of what the hackers were doing at the time (writing and sharing code).
I recall another programmer being irritated by the letter and writing his own basic interpreter and asking $5 for it (which was far less than what Gates was asking).
Book is worth reading for the historical context of computing if you weren't around to see it.
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Edit [Relevant part of wikipedia page]:
Tiny BASIC: Altair BASIC was an interpreter that translated instructions from the BASIC programming language into assembly instructions that the Altair 8800 could understand. It was developed by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Micro-soft, specifically for the Altair 8800 and it would fit in 4K of memory. Unlike previous hackers and against the Hacker Ethic, Micro-Soft and MITS felt that people should pay for BASIC just like they paid for any add-on card. Many hackers had in fact put in orders for BASIC, but still had to wait for the order to be shipped. During a show put up by MITS, someone got hold of and copied a paper tape containing Altair BASIC.
The tapes were duplicated and passed around freely before the commercial product was even shipped to customers. Gates and Allen did not appreciate this turn of events since they were actually paid commission for each copy of BASIC that MITS sold. Gates responded by writing an open letter titled “Open Letter to Hobbyists” that considered the sharing of software to be theft. Tiny BASIC was a similar interpreter that would fit in only 2K of memory as it supported a subset of the functionality of Micro-Soft BASIC (which itself was a subset of Dartmouth BASIC).
It was developed by Dick Whipple and John Arnold in Tyler, Texas and distributed freely in PCC magazine. Many more people sent in improvements and programs developed in Tiny BASIC to be published. This eventually led to the creation of Dr. Dobb's Journal edited by Jim Warren that distributed free or very inexpensive software in response to Gates' claims of theft. Tom Pittman was someone else who did not take kindly to Gates' words. He wrote a version of Tiny BASIC for the Motorola 6800 microprocessor.
Although he sold it to AMI for $3,500, he retained the rights to sell it to others and decided to charge only $5 for it. He received many orders and even money from people who had already gotten a copy and simply wanted to pay him for his efforts. Pittman also wrote the essay “Deus Ex Machina” on the AI and hardware hackers and what tied them together. Lee Felsenstein and Bob Marsh banded together to create a fully contained computer for an issue of Popular Electronics that they called SOL that sold for under a thousand dollars.
That actually made sense when a difference of a few KB meant a difference between whether or not you'd be able to fit your own application into memory.
There was at least one early BASIC extension, for example, where you could pick the commands you wanted "a la carte", with number of bytes required for each one of them listed, to pack the ones that were most important for you to fit into a specific size. You'd pay for the size you chose.
Imagine if there would've been a way to force 100% of people who got Windows in China, India, and other poor countries all over the world to pay up $100 or more for their copy.
If that would've been at all possible, I think Linux would've had higher than 50% market share in the PC market today. For that kind of poor countries, Windows licenses were and still are prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of their citizens, so if being forced to buy Windows instead of pirating it, I think most would've just gone with Linux, and its adoption would've exploded within a few years, from the moment everyone in poor countries had to make that decision. Therefore software support from the big vendors would've arrived relatively quickly.
Unfortunately for us (and fortunately for Microsoft), there was no way to force people into that decision, so we were left with a Windows monopoly for the past 2 decades.
This is the major problem I have while trying to tell people about Linux (and other open-source software). It's hard to argue against "my [proprietary software] copy was free" - when effectively, it was, since nothing will happen to them.
I read once where Bill Gates predicted that eventually people would buy software and that the hardware would be free. I can't remember where I read it ('Business at the Speed of Light', maybe?) but it stuck with me as just, well, ridiculous.
Anyway, the fact that he says "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." kind of makes me wonder how he ever ended up with that thought I mentioned at the start.
And I know it sounds crazy that he would ever think that: that's why it stuck with me I guess.
I read once where Bill Gates predicted that eventually people would buy software and that the hardware would be free. I can't remember where I read it ('Business at the Speed of Light', maybe?) but it stuck with me as just, well, ridiculous.
Have you looked at any carrier's web site recently? Tons of $0 full-featured Android smartphones, and tons of apps for sale (subsidized by service fees, of course).
I guess when I read it I didn't think "hardware is free as in you'll be paying for a contract of service where the cost of that service includes the cost of the hardware".
I mean, if we're to be able to redefine 'actual' costs like that, maybe my house is free... it's just included in the cost of my bank sending me a statement every month.
I do see your point, though: it definitely seems that way, but surely nobody can argue that the production cost of one more piece of hardware is more 'free' than that of a piece of software.
The entertainment market is another good example of what he might have been thinking of. Many games consoles and video devices have been sold at a loss, though it's obviously a greater gamble than selling payment plans disguised as service.
You conveniently left out that there are way more $$$ smartphones and tons of apps for FREE. Even inside walled gardens.
Not to mention the desktop and laptop space where you buy your hardware (and OS if you're not using a free one like Linux) but then there are a lot of free apps.
This is not ridiculous, it's the definition of Software as a Service.
There are two main factors at play:
1) Cost of reproduction (copying)
2) Value to end user
Hardware has historically been harder to reproduce because it's physical. This gap is closing as hardware becomes a commodity. You don't need a server anymore - just spin one up on EC2. Need chips? visit a Chinese bulk electronics markets and buy them by the scoop.
Software provides more value to the end user because it makes the hardware do something. People pay for great software because it cleverly moves information around to meet their needs. You still need hardware to run it, eventually, but it becomes dramatically less important. The servers that power your webmail are entirely abstract to an end user. Angry Birds runs on basically anything. etc
I think he would say now that this letter was rather short sighted. It seems the theft of basic by hobbyists may have lead to the catalyst needed for his software to dominate the commercial PC market some years later. Clearly it wasn't just him developing software for these computers. I wonder how they attributed licensing to it. Or if there even was such a thing at that time.
Funny how some things change, yet stay the same. Glad the OP posted this.
I readily grant that there's a huge amount of selection bias to this, but from this remove, it's difficult not to read this as, "pirate all the software you please, we'll still end up as billionaires."
My only reservation on that line of argument is that, apparently, it "caused quite a stir at the time". But yes, the selection bias here is real enough.
Can't agree more. I still have to see a software vendor out of business because of piracy. In fact, piracy is usually an indication of strong sales and lack of piracy speaks a lot of how interested people are in your software.
An interesting line from that article, which I hadn't previously seen:
> In early 1976 ads for its Apple I computer, Apple Inc made the claims that "our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost"[23] and "yes folks, Apple BASIC is Free"[24]
Let's say you are a freelance developer. Do you think for one second that it would be ok for your clients to let you do all the work, then take your code and not pay you? I mean, knowledge should be free, right? Screw the fact that you built the software with the expectation of getting paid for your hard work.
It's one thing to create something with the intention of sharing it with the world. It's an entirely different thing for anybody to justify stealing what you have done.