:11:00
They are the ones who give
hobbyists a bad name,
:11:02
and should be kicked out of any
club meeting they show up at.
:11:06
I would appreciate letters from
anyone who wants to pay up,
:11:10
or has a suggestion or comment.
:11:12
Signed Bill Gates, General partner, Micro-Soft.
:11:17
In the late 70's and early 1980's,
Richard Stallman was
:11:22
doing Artificial Intelligence research and coding
:11:26
at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab.
:11:29
Richard had a number of negative experiences
:11:32
during that period which soured him
:11:34
on the whole idea of commercial software.
:11:36
[ such as? ]
:11:38
uh... some company wanted to work on and
wanted to fix was locked up.
:11:44
and he couldn't get the company that owned
on the code to let him fix it
:11:50
even though it would have been to their advantage to do so.
:11:52
And that put me into a moral dilemma, you see?
:11:56
Because to get one of the modern computers
of the day, which was the early 80's,
:12:03
you would have to get a proprietory
operating system.
:12:07
The developers of those systems
didn't share with other people,
:12:10
Instead they tried to control the users,
:12:13
dominate the users, restrict them.
:12:15
Say, if to get the system,
:12:18
you have to sign a promise you won't
share with anybody else.
:12:22
And to me that was essentially a promise
to be a bad person,
:12:27
to betray the rest of the world,
:12:29
cut myself off from society
from a cooperating community.
:12:35
And I had already experienced what happened
when other people did that to us,
:12:40
when they refused to share with us.
:12:42
because they had signed these contracts.
:12:45
And it hurt the whole lab,
:12:47
it kept us from doing useful things before.
:12:51
So I just wasn't going to do that.
:12:54
I thought,"This is wrong!
I am not going to live this way"
:12:59
And from experiences like this
he developed a profound hostility