Bill Gates
Co-founder and CEO, Microsoft
Software as a licensed product, on every desk
Rating
97Impact score
Domains
Operating systemsLicensingApplications
Scouting report
Understood before anyone that the money was in the software, not the machine, and structured the 1980 MS-DOS deal with IBM to keep the right to license it to everybody else. His 1976 Open Letter to Hobbyists, which called copying Altair BASIC theft, is the document free software spent twenty years arguing with. Microsoft was found to have violated the Sherman Act in 2000.
Curator’s note
The counterparty in the argument this entire site descends from.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Bill Gates by Bogdan Hoyaux / European Union, licensed CC BY 4.0.
Sources
- 01Bill Gates en.wikipedia.org
- 02An Open Letter to Hobbyists (1976) en.wikipedia.org
- 03United States v. Microsoft Corp. en.wikipedia.org