this is from the the early days of hobby computing
in the seventies
uh... in in uh...
essentially silicon valley what is now called silicon valley
this was a group of
people from various origins who were interested in
tinkering with computers as a hobby
which was a
thing that was just about affordable by this point
the thing about a the homebrew club it's set up in the environs of stanford
and it became very popular very quickly uh...
it met at the stanford linear accelerator building
and the um...
it had as it were an ethos a uh... sensibility
which was that people were all in it together
they were experimenting
but they were sharing the results of their experiments
and the idea was that if somebody came in with a piece of code say then
the piece of code
could be shared and the rule was that
if you recorded code
uh... laterally on cassette tapes because they this was a medium that was just coming in for recording
computer
uh... software
you could borrow a cassette tape from what became a relatively formal library
if you brought it back and especially if you brought back another cassette tape with your own contribution
so it's a kind of moral economy if you like
uh... but it's a moral economy where sharing is a prime virtue
now the problem with this which is kind of an internet ethos these days is it not
the apple
system emerged from this although slightly departed from it very fast but steve wozniak
and steve jobs were in the home brew club
and that the early prototypes of the apple one
and the apple two were
shown in this homebrew club to other participants
it became an issue with gate and his then very young company microsoft
when the homebrew club tried to incorporate into its moral economy
the code for the basic programming language that had been written for the altair which was a
uh... manufactured
hobby computer
uh... that basically had been written by microsoft it was microsoft's founding product
and so when gates found out that this code had been essentially appropriated and was circulating through
the hobbyists
he wrote an open letter which has become a famous statement in the history of computing denouncing their
practice has theft
and arguing essentially that
in order to build quality software and to make of this more than just a game
you had to develop real kind of corporate
strategies which involved property
and if you'd simply shared then it was a violation of this it really was theft to him that letter
which is called an open letter to hobbyists
uh... has come to mark a parting of the ways as it were
uh... between the ethos of
sharing openness research exploration
and the proprietorial relatively closed approach
that
microsoft still has to this day gates said that in order to have real progress
you had to treat it as serious intellectual property and you can't steal it and so forth
do you think linux is the living refutation of that
yes essentially
uh... it's actually a slightly complicated business because of linux's background
and how the fact that it's not
just one thing it's been developed over different bases
uh... but yes and i think microsoft actually came to realize that in the nineteen nineties
when linux
having burst on the scene
didn't just disappear
didn't kind of find itself riddled with flaws when flaws and and um...
and
viruses and so on showed up
linux proved amazingly efficient at dealing with them getting rid of them
uh... so there's again a famous moment when
some internal microsoft documents
were leaked to the open source community these became known as the halloween documents you can look them up
online if you want
which reveal the concern
within microsoft's higher echelons when it was realized that linux wasn't a flash in the
pan
and that there really was an alternative model for how to proceed here that was viable and
in some ways
more viable
than proprietary models
so I think the short answer to that is yes
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