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The BASIC had been a rush job. When William Gates and PaulAllen had brought their raw creation to MITS -by this point desperately in need of a BASIC - they had not even had a chance to make sure it worked. But it had, well enough for MITS to sign up for it and offer a royalty. Gates, twenty, had then more or less dropped out of Harvard to pursue the opportunity. But royalty income had proved far lower than he had anticipated. In fact, MITS seemed to be selling only one copy of Micro-Soft's BASIC for every ten Altairs. It was therefore in a context of crisis that Gates got word that the language had been distributed throughout the very community that ought to have furnished his market. When the editor of a newly formed Altair Users'Newsletter asked for his reaction, Gates decided to respond aggressively. He published an open letter to hobbyists that assailed not just the particular perpetrators of the "theft" (as he called it), but, in sweeping terms, the culture that endorsed such actions. Its premise was that a vast potential "market" for microcomputingwas being stymied by a lack of good, reliable software, along with the documentation and education that would enable users to make the most of it, and that only a proprietary regime could justify the substantial investments needed to produce those things. Gates claimed that his own BASIC had taken a year and $40,000 of computer time to create, with results the quality of which correspondence from users amply confirmed. But those users had not played their part by actually buying the program. "Most of you steal your software," Gates bluntly accused. What they saw as openness and collaboration was now "theft" pure and simple. Far from being justified by MITS's monopolistic behavior, it was itself a moral offense. It was simply not "fair." Rerecorders of programs gave all hobbyists a bad name, Gates insisted; they should be "kicked out of any club meeting they show up at." The possibility that conviviality might be a principled position was silently trumped by an assertion of this distinct moral community That a unified authorial body (be it a single writer or a company) and a centralized, industrial system of production were essential to produce "quality" software was implicit and necessary to Gates's case. It was this author that the act of sharing was unfair to, and this system that must be created to allow home computing to thrive.26

Gates's letter inaugurated a mini-campaign on Micro-Soft's part, with a successor declaration issued a few months later, and a speech that he gave in March. The effort was never likely to achieve much by itself, however. As Dompier remarked, "complaining about piracy didn't stop anything," because sharing software was "like taping music off the air." 27 Gates himself tacitly conceded as much: he made sure to insulate his company from practices of this kind by signing no more royalty deals. But the publicity served its greater purpose. It made explicit the tensions already present in hobbyists' conventions, and forced recognition of the economic implications of the hobbyists' moral economy. The Homebrew Coin- puterClub Newsletter voiced qualified approval of his position, for example, even though it prefaced its own printing of the letter by reminding readers that with the PCC's version "you can homebrew your own BASIC." Yet the more committed still gave Gates a hostile reception. Many were convinced that the BASIC they were sharing was in truth a public good anyway, having been developed on publicly funded machines. It was not just that Gates had called them thieves, therefore, but that an expropriator of common property had called theirs a morality of theft. Gates's statement would go down in computer lore as the canonical declaration of a rift over intellectual property and access that would divide the digital world from then on.

FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE NET

Out of the early years of home computing emerged rival approaches to creative property, including those that decreed