The Open Letter to Hobbyists was an open letter written on February 3, 1976 by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. An open letter is a letter that is intended to be read by a wide audience. ... February 3 is the 34th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1976 is a leap year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ... Bill Gates William Henry Gates III, KBE (born October 28, 1955), commonly known as Bill Gates, is an American businessman and a microcomputer pioneer. ... Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) is the worlds largest software company, with over 50,000 employees in various countries as of May 2004. ...

In the letter, Gates expresses frustration over the fact that most computer hobbyists who were currently using his company's Altair BASIC software had not paid for it. Gates asserts that such widespread unauthorized copying in effect discourages developers from investing time and money into creating quality software. The core of Gates' argument hinges on the unfairness of gaining the benefits of software authors' time, effort, and capital, but then depriving them of the royalties that they are legally entitled to receive. "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?", he asks. Altair BASIC, in its first incarnation, MITS 4K BASIC, was a true milestone in software history — the first programming language for the worlds first truly personal computer, the MITS Altair 8800. ...

This letter has become an important milestone for the development and expansion of the retail software market and what the Free Software Foundation calls "proprietary software". Commercial software is software that is sold for profit, and represented, until recently, the vast majority of all software used. ... The Free Software Foundation logo Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a non-profit organization founded in October 1985 by Richard Stallman to support the free software movement (free as in freedom), and in particular the GNU project, through the use of GNU Licenses (see below). ... Proprietary software is a term used to describe software designed, coded, and owned by a defined person, organization or group of organizations. ...

External links

• Text of the letter