alt.hn

2/1/2026 at 5:21:50 PM

50 years ago, a young Bill Gates took on the 'software pirates'

 https://thenewstack.io/50-years-ago-a-young-bill-gates-took-on-the-software-pirates/

by MilnerRoute

2/3/2026 at 6:55:39 AM

Is not generally well known but Microsoft stole the idea of product activation ( as used in Windows XP and more ) and copied the methodology of the activation parameters etc from the guy that invented and patented it . There was a big court case about it and appeals , it ended with Microsoft having to pay penalty of (I recall ) $250M USD . There is very brief info on this wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ric_Richardson

There is a much more detailed video by Ric RIchardson around I will see if I can find it and post the link .....

OK found the link. https://rss.com/podcasts/unemployable/1485621/

This link has blurb for another entrepreneur company, just ignore / skip that. There is a part where the inventor gives detailed info about the court battle with Microsoft and technical details of his product activation technology.

by asdefghyk

2/3/2026 at 7:07:42 AM

One other thing , if you want to know all the dodgy court cases Microsoft got involved in and the penalty's that had to pay- it will be mentioned / disclosed in their annual financial reports - since these large amounts , even possible amounts needed to be advised to shareholders in case /if/when they lost .....

I should add a party to the court case , disclosed the amount Cira $250M USD

even though in wikipedia says its not disclosed ....

by asdefghyk

2/3/2026 at 8:11:01 AM

They might have stolen the "patented method" (and i know how much u guys love patents), but they certainly did not steal the "idea". Software has had all sorts of horrible copy-protection for decades before this was introduced.

by flomo

2/3/2026 at 9:34:17 AM

In the quoted source from the inventor -the inventor mentions his disbelief that Microsoft used the exact same parameters (that the inventor used ) as determined from the PC - I think things like MAC address etc to uniquely id the machine

That's part of what I meant "... steal the idea ..."

Of course, the comment that there are lots copy protection methods ( previously ) is correct

THe inventor also had to spend cira about $15M in legal fees to bring his case. ANd that is many years ago 15-20? so a much bigger $ today. A small company would have no chance to be able to afford such a financial outlay ... Microsoft was often accused of obtaining information under NDA then developing their own similar product etc One case I recall was PEN computing. Pen Computing lost their case with the result "not proven" There where many more such cases, similar from smaller companies. Of course how many that where valid is unknown , since the court case often not go ahead, since small company not have resources ....

by asdefghyk

2/3/2026 at 9:46:03 AM

Not listening to a blahcast, but shit like MAC addresses and other hardware IDs were well known to everyone in the field. Companies had 'inventory systems' which used this long before MS cared. I certainly don't begrudge anyone from getting their patented pound of flesh from Gates, just pointing out this is a great litmus test between the GNU and the not.

by flomo

2/3/2026 at 1:42:59 PM

I think the above comment was about product activation specifically, and not the general concept of copy protection.

Of course, whether the method used for XP-era product activation should ever have been patentable in the first place is another questoin.

by Gormo

2/3/2026 at 7:04:46 AM

The irony of stealing product activation is WOW :) welcome to capitalism.

by metadat

2/3/2026 at 8:56:24 AM

welcome to humanity: do as I say, not as I do

by apples_oranges

2/3/2026 at 9:51:44 AM

Wow wow wow... wait a moment... I thought HN agreed that the idea of software patents was ludicrous... what happened here that everybody agrees in this case that this was theft??

by blell

2/3/2026 at 3:39:09 PM

There's never been any shortage of hypocrisy here when it comes to intellectual property. Terry Pratchett captured it perfectly in Going Postal: “It was a little like stealing. It was exactly like stealing. It was, in fact, stealing. But there was no law against it because no one knew the crime existed, so is it really stealing if what’s stolen isn’t missed? And is it stealing if you’re stealing from thieves? Anyway, all property is theft, except mine.” The modern version of that last sentence would be "Intellectual property isn't real, except mine."

by ThrowawayR2

2/3/2026 at 9:13:08 AM

Of course, he left out the fact that the $40,000.00 USD worth of computer time was stolen from a US government owned computer on loan to one of his professors. He didn't actually PAY $40k USD or even raise funds to cover the equivalent value of the stolen computer time. Gates is a thief, and this was just his first big heist. I was always of the opinion that he US government should have gotten a cut of MS BASIC since it couldn't have been built without the modified emulator handling the ALTAIR 8080 assembly instructions.

by swagtricker

2/1/2026 at 6:31:32 PM

The person authoring the Post-Open License (discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783500), a paid shared source license in all but name, is the fellow they chose to interview about Gates' letter? How ... ironic. The reasoning behind POL and the growing number of shared source licenses is exactly the same as Gates' letter: developers deserve to get paid for their efforts instead of having their code shared without compensation. Both are a ringing endorsement of Gates' argument, not libre software and the Four Freedoms.

by ThrowawayR2

2/3/2026 at 6:34:58 AM

Bill Gates was a ruthless and predatory business man. It is well known - Used to build in deliberate incompatibilities with the Windows

by asdefghyk

2/3/2026 at 8:55:32 AM

Recent news show he's not only predatory business-wise.

by margorczynski

2/3/2026 at 12:15:46 PM

Like I said in the other submission;

By the time people realized he wanted all the booty for himself, it was too late :\

by fuzzfactor

2/3/2026 at 6:01:51 AM

Seriously, I consider this to be Microsoft's key innovation: the idea that people should pay for software and that people should be forced to pay for software.

by kens

2/3/2026 at 6:45:47 AM

The payment for software was well established on big iron by the 1970s before Microsoft were established

by smackeyacky

2/3/2026 at 1:33:44 PM

That was supposed to be enough.

It was well-accepted even at big companies like HP, microcomputers that fit on a desk were intended for individual "owners" to get the most out of the electronics by widely sharing programs so each person in that particular hardware ecosystem from the beginning could build on everybody else's work.

"Teams" weren't supposed to be necessary.

At least for the utility type of things that there was the most widespread need for. Nobody dreamed of making an improvent to something like a file manager and not contributing it to a newsletter.

There's no faster way to move ahead when you're talking about technology.

Something truly novel would probably be expected to receive a patent, otherwise code itself was not copyrighted like it can be today. Most people considered code to be the part of the computer that you programmed in yourself, and everybody needed as many sources as possible to learn from or nobody was going to get as far as the electronics were capable of. Everybody was expected to freely run all kinds of things that other people wrote, otherwise how are best practices supposed to arise?

This was before PC's or even Apples, these were industrial HP's not hobbyists using them at home.

These were microprocessor devices, built to be ideally affordable like nothing else, just the opposite of a mainframe which had always been out-of-reach for almost all aspiring programmers.

The idea was for nothing about them to cost money for the user unless there was absolutely no other way. And then it needed to be attractively priced. Nothing else could be considered suitable.

Most of the code to do most anything that most anybody was doing, was supposed to be easily available without actual business transactions. So the only programming you had to do yourself was mainly the specialized stuff for your own unique requirements beyond that. And that was supposed to get easier constantly because everything else was moving forward for every user in unison. The sky was the limit if microprocessors could catch on and everybody get the most they have to offer. After a few decades at the rate it was going? Sheesh.

Like nothing else can compare to, that part was getting easier all the time as everything was building upon the continuous progress everyone with that type hardware was making.

Until Gates came along and did this.

by fuzzfactor

2/3/2026 at 6:23:36 PM

I'll mention that mainframes also had extensive libraries of shared software. The IBM user group SHARE (Society to Help Avoid Redundant Effort) started in 1955 to share software and had hundreds of programs in an IBM-maintained library. IBM also had the Contributed Program Library. Software ranged from math libraries to programming languages to statistics packages to nuclear reactor simulators.

References: https://www.si.edu/object/archives/sova-nmah-ac-0498 http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/650/programLibrary/Addition... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Type-III_Library https://web.archive.org/web/20110322030511/http://www.bitsav...

by kens

2/3/2026 at 3:30:36 PM

The suggestion that nobody was considering selling for-profit software on microcomputers out of hacker camaraderie seems rather difficult to believe, to put it mildly. CP/M wasn't free either IIRC and pre-dates Gates' BASIC.

[EDIT] Beyond that, if it hadn't been Gates, it would have been Steve Jobs. And if it hadn't been him either, it unquestionably would have been IBM, once they started taking the microcomputer market seriously and released the IBM PC.

by ThrowawayR2

2/3/2026 at 5:27:43 PM

You could very well be right on the money, Jobs might have been the one if Gates didn't beat him to it.

I really did exaggerate, it wasn't exactly nobody.

But things like CP/M were completely un-necessary on a proper microcomputer which has the OS in ROM like it's supposed to be.

I liked Jobs because at the time he was carrying on the idea of almost all code free for his hardware as much as possible, just like the other pioneering companies and enthusiasts.

CP/M was a specialty item for a small niche of super-enthusiasts, so they could utilize the additional features it provided right away without having to write code for that themselves. It was worth money to them. Once the PC came out with MS-DOS included, that was the affordable choice for PC's by far. People would have rather not had DOS either if the IBM brand had just included a ROM OS of some kind instead. We wanted disks for storage not for an operating system, that was supposed to be taken for granted.

By that time, CP/M was known for being exorbitantly more expensive than MS-DOS, and ordinary non-corporate users couldn't even come near affording Microsoft offerings as his letter describes.

Everything was going to be just fine once computers got popular enough for there to be enough critical mass among the majority, which were already making more than enough progress sharing without copyright annoyances [0], to overtake companies like Microsoft technically within a few years, except in those niche areas where that kind of thing once belonged.

By providing for user choice of a copyrightable OS, not only at different price points, but price points to being with, IBM set the wheels in motion for there to be far less choice for decades to come.

When you think about it, the way AI is finally capable of putting out some decent code that is so remarkable, is partly because it is effectively bypassing the progress that has been curtailed up until now because of its workaround of copyright alone. Compensating for people not having access to all progress that has been made up until any point in time, over decades, and coming out smelling like a rose more than you would have thought.

If people themselves hadn't had this restriction this whole time, don't you think overall human advancement would have made the amazing AI results seem less surprising and more of an incremental move?

[0] If I said most people were not thinking about it, that's not true. Almost nobody was thinking about it. Almost :) I'm also sure they would have started thinking about it sooner or later, the ka-ching sound has quite an echo, but it would have been just fine with only patents and no copyright like it had been before.

by fuzzfactor

2/3/2026 at 8:01:42 AM

What Microsoft actually did was make deals with OEMs and distributors so they got paid for every machine sold. In the 1980s, home computers had MS-BASIC in the ROMs, and PCs came with "Vendor DOS", you couldn't even buy MS-DOS.

by flomo

2/3/2026 at 9:18:47 AM

I don't get what I should be angry about here? That Bill Gates wrote something when he was 20? 20 year olds say stupid things all the time. Think about you when you were 20.

by adrians1

2/3/2026 at 5:55:41 AM

Microsoft quickly learned to pick their battles and basically left Windows anti-piracy features at "just about anyone will be able to do it" level, pretty much only going after large dodgy companies. MS benefited enormously from all the piracy in developing countries, around teenage tinkerers and so on.

by jojobas

2/3/2026 at 7:57:37 AM

We are still trying to recover from the damage done.

by snvzz

2/1/2026 at 6:37:16 PM

From what was their victim software derived? How much time did it take to write the letter?

Is this the one with Noah Wylie?

XEROX Alto (PARC ), 86DOS, CPM DOS, BASIC,

Xerox Alto (1973) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

The Altair 8800 has an Intel 8080 CPU:

Altair 8800: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

Intel 8080 -> Intel 8088

CP/M (1974) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M

DOS > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS#History

86-DOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS :

> 86-DOS shared a few of its commands with other operating systems such as OS/8 and CP/M, which made it easy to port programs from the latter. Its application programming interface was very similar to that of CP/M. The system was licensed and then purchased by Microsoft and developed further as MS-DOS and PC DOS. [2]

BASIC > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_interpreter#History

HP had BASIC on mainframes in the 1960s.

This paper (ScholarlyArticle) was published in 1974:

"A BASIC Language Interpreter for the Intel 8008 Microprocessor". ACM. (1974) from UIUC: University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana .. archive.org: https://archive.org/details/basiclanguageint658weav/page/n8/... .. scholar: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=A+B...

"What Bill Gates’ first commercial code (Altair BASIC) looks like under the hood" https://maizure.org/projects/decoded-altair-basic/index.html .. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1o9wk8x/what_b... :

Monte Davidoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Davidoff :

> Davidoff was assigned the task of writing floating-point arithmetic routines for Altair BASIC over the summer, when the three of them lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where their company was then headquartered.[1] Gates, Allen, and Davidoff managed to write the software without ever seeing the Altair 8800 thanks to a simulator

BASIC > History > Microcomputer era: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_interpreter :

> In January 1975, the Altair 8800 was announced and sparked the microcomputer revolution. One of the first microcomputer versions of BASIC was co-written by Gates, Allen, and Monte Davidoff for their newly formed company, Micro-Soft. This was released by MITS in punch tape format for the Altair 8800 shortly after the machine itself, [7] showcasing BASIC as the primary language for early microcomputers.

> In March 1975, Steve Wozniak attended the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club and began formulating the design of his own computer. Club members were excited by Altair BASIC. [8] Wozniak concluded that his machine would have to have a BASIC of its own. At the time he was working at Hewlett Packard and used their TS-BASIC minicomputer dialect as the basis for his own version. Integer BASIC was released on cassette for the Apple I, and was supplied in ROM when the Apple II shipped in the summer of 1977. [9]

..Re: FreeBASIC, Q64, EDIT.COM and its new rust clone; where it's at today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44018152

by westurner

2/3/2026 at 5:15:19 AM

And if those pirates had been successful young Billy might not have grown up to be such a naughty boy.

by jordanb

2/3/2026 at 5:36:41 AM

I find it fascinating how this particular sites' users post articles like this while there's so much obscene news about the dude right now.

by King-Aaron

2/3/2026 at 9:13:33 AM

The dead internet is alive and well

by detectivestory

2/3/2026 at 5:52:02 AM

He was implicated in infidelity and STDs, not kiddie diddling, or was he?

by jojobas

2/3/2026 at 5:56:21 AM

I mean (allegedly) giving your significant other an STD, and then trying to procure secretive meds to give to them so that you don't have to tell them is high up on the list of horrible behavior for a person

by selecsosi

2/3/2026 at 6:16:56 AM

who is downvoting this? you can just go read about this. it's not a lie.

by Kapura

2/3/2026 at 6:21:14 AM

People that don’t believe it’s that “horrible”.

by dyauspitr

2/3/2026 at 7:04:44 AM

No its because the emails were not written by Bill. They were written by Epstein to himself and were drafts that were never sent see above https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46867505

by dngray

2/3/2026 at 7:23:08 AM

They were drafted by Epstein on behalf of Bill's (former) doctor; there's no knowing whether the doctor actually sent it or not.

by logicchains

2/3/2026 at 1:48:30 PM

Let's be real here it is all part of the culture wars. Gates is politically left, gives money to charities, believes in climate change etc.

He's also an excellent lightning rod for Trump.

It reminds me of how we get memes about transsexuals abusing children but absolute silence about all the church members who are caught daily.

by expedition32

2/3/2026 at 1:56:14 PM

> believes in climate change etc.

He "evolved" on this after the election..

by jordanb

2/3/2026 at 9:31:43 AM

It's either non-criminal or way less criminal than the new gold standard of billionaire horrible.

by jojobas

2/3/2026 at 7:01:42 AM

Not everyone mentioned in the Epstein documents is associated with kid diddling.

Also the thing about "surreptitiously giving melinda antibiotics" weren't actually written by Bill and he has since denied it.

> It’s unclear who the Boris referenced in the emails is, or if the messages were ever sent to anyone. Only Epstein is listed in the to and from fields.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/871879/bill-gates-epstein-file...

So the emails were some emails in Epstein's draft folder he never sent to anyone. This is a dude who peddled in dirt and leverage against anyone and anything, probably how he got so wealthy and why he had his island parties in the first place. There is a reason why in the Kevin Rudd related mentions he is described as a "odious character in the extreme" basically stay clear from him.

by dngray

2/3/2026 at 6:21:49 AM

Epstein made the claim, but there's no indiction whether it is true, or him making it up for clout/just to mess with Gates, etc.

by IncreasePosts

2/3/2026 at 8:55:23 AM

Maybe true, may not be. But based on track record, i wouldn't put it past him

by byzantinegene

2/3/2026 at 6:10:34 AM

There's a bunch of stuff coming out about his coordination with Epstein to run pandemic simulations, and a lot of business level stuff going on after Epstein's initial run-ins with the law. That aside if he's on a personal enough level to ask him for antibiotics to sneakily slip his wife, then Bill would definitely know about all the rest.

Really don't have any more room to give these people the benefit of doubt.

by King-Aaron

2/3/2026 at 7:06:00 AM

If you’re Bill/Melinda and you’re undertaking a massive project to change the world positively, why not take money from Epstein? The public benefit would dwarf whatever benefit Jeff could obtain.

by jimbob45

2/3/2026 at 7:09:19 AM

Well to be honest with you - its because they murdered and raped children.

That would be like, fairly high on my list of reasons.

by King-Aaron

2/3/2026 at 7:56:18 AM

Well first off, if you're bill and melinda gates you just have more money then Epstien. Flat out.

But you know also there is the whole why would you take money from a convicted pedophile. Oh and why would you ask that convicted pedo to get you drugs so that you can hide the fact you gave your wife a STD from a russian hooker.

If you hung out with Epstien after his initial conviction then the burden of proof should be on you that YOU also arent a pedo. Fuck everyone involved with him. and fuck bill gates.

by westpfelia

2/3/2026 at 6:12:22 AM

What stuff? Adultery is pretty milquetoast

by dyauspitr

2/3/2026 at 11:54:26 AM

The whole Epstein-Saga from the victims, the scale of operations, to the sheer range of people he connected from Gates, to Bannon to German Newspaper Editor-In-Chiefs, makes Berlusconis Bunga Bunga parties seem wholesome and decent.

by woodpanel

2/3/2026 at 9:20:48 AM

There is more that should be said about this story.

About Bill gates complaining about software pirates steal ing Microsoft software

When Microsoft grew large , rich and much more powerful, they where know to steal ideas from small companies . Companies that did not have financial resources to proceed with a some what court case. Since Microsoft had much larger financial resources.

Consider

These are some Google results for " Microsoft copied IP from smaller companies where they could "

AI Overview Microsoft has faced numerous lawsuits and allegations of copying intellectual property (IP) from smaller companies and competitors throughout its history, with some cases resulting in large fines and legal orders.

Specific examples include: i4i: In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a Microsoft appeal against a $290 million verdict for infringing on a small Canadian company's patent related to a text manipulation tool used in Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007.

Burst.com: Microsoft was sued by Burst.com, which alleged that Microsoft stole its patented media transmission technology and incorporated it into Windows Media Player 9 after a two-year collaboration that ended without a licensing agreement.

Apple: In 1988, Apple sued Microsoft, alleging that Windows 2.0 copied 189 different elements of the Macintosh operating system user interface. This case was eventually settled. The original graphical user interface (GUI) technology used by both Apple and Microsoft was initially developed at Xerox's PARC labs.

Disk Doubling Software: According to one report, Microsoft was accused of examining a third party's disk doubling software under the pretense of licensing it, only to produce a nearly identical "independently developed" product that even included the original's disabled test code and comments. This resulted in Microsoft paying millions in a settlement.

Netscape and Antitrust Concerns: Microsoft's business practices, particularly its inclusion of Internet Explorer with Windows to undermine competitor Netscape, led to a major antitrust lawsuit by the U.S. government in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which found Microsoft had engaged in unlawful monopolization.

These cases have contributed to a perception that Microsoft, in its pursuit of market dominance, has historically leveraged its powerful position to appropriate technology from smaller entities

AI Overview Microsoft has faced numerous lawsuits and allegations of copying intellectual property (IP) from smaller companies and competitors throughout its history, with some cases resulting in large fines and legal orders.

Specific examples include: i4i: In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a Microsoft appeal against a $290 million verdict for infringing on a small Canadian company's patent related to a text manipulation tool used in Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007.

Burst.com: Microsoft was sued by Burst.com, which alleged that Microsoft stole its patented media transmission technology and incorporated it into Windows Media Player 9 after a two-year collaboration that ended without a licensing agreement.

Apple: In 1988, Apple sued Microsoft, alleging that Windows 2.0 copied 189 different elements of the Macintosh operating system user interface. This case was eventually settled. The original graphical user interface (GUI) technology used by both Apple and Microsoft was initially developed at Xerox's PARC labs. Disk Doubling Software: According to one report, Microsoft was accused of examining a third party's disk doubling software under the pretense of licensing it, only to produce a nearly identical "independently developed" product that even included the original's disabled test code and comments. This resulted in Microsoft paying millions in a settlement.

Netscape and Antitrust Concerns: Microsoft's business practices, particularly its inclusion of Internet Explorer with Windows to undermine competitor Netscape, led to a major antitrust lawsuit by the U.S. government in the late 1990s and early 2000s, which found Microsoft had engaged in unlawful monopolization. These cases have contributed to a perception that Microsoft, in its pursuit of market dominance, has historically leveraged its powerful position to appropriate technology from smaller entities

by asdefghyk

2/3/2026 at 6:43:57 AM

And today, half a century later, most HN and Reddit software people are enthusiasts about software licenses. Followers, no doubt, of this philosophy.

by renewiltord