[ILUG] Way OT - Bill Gates Invented Open Source?!

[David Golden]

On Tuesday 20 November 2001 00:58, cybersean3000 at yahoo.com wrote:
> Has anyone seen this?  Is it remotely true?
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/22749.html
>
> _________________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com

Bill Gates had a part in the creation of the Free Software movement, anyway,
but as one of the uber-villains, way back in 1976:

Once upon a time, nearly all software came with source, under informal terms, 
and people generally thought nothing of sharing it.   Computer manufacturers 
made money off the hardware sales, and the software was just a part of the 
system to be customised at will by the end-user (who were mainly working in 
academic research environments, or sometimes financial or military 
organisations).

 Then, in 1976, a certain young man wrote a rather nasty letter* to all those 
programmers who were "working for free" in his eyes, and kicked off the 
Proprietary Software movement in a big way,thus spawning the past 25 years of 
pointless wheel-reinvention that is the commercial, closed-source software 
world.  

*See "An Open Letter to Hobbyists", William Henry Gates III, releases
on February 3, 1976.

Gate's genius was never as a programmer, but as a maestro of establishing 
a legal and business framework allowing unscrupulous programmers to sell the 
same artificially-scarce abstract goods to idiot consumers over and over 
again.

This provided one of the main kicks to RMS to formalise the Free Software
movement (that, and Gosling producing a proprietary reimplementation of RMS's 
baby, Emacs...).