"Open Letter to Hobbyists," sparked a decade-long conflict between proprietary software interests and the burgeoning hacker community, ultimately paving the way for the modern open source movement.

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Bill Gates' 1976 "Open Letter to Hobbyists" complained about software piracy of Altair BASIC, sparking a decades-long conflict between proprietary software advocates and the hacker community. The letter, written when Gates was 20, argued that 90% of users hadn't paid for BASIC and that piracy stifled software development. The hobbyist community responded by creating free alternatives like Tiny BASIC and eventually laid the groundwork for the Free Software Movement (1983) and Open Source definition (1998). Despite initial resistance from figures like Steve Jobs, open source ultimately became mainstream, with Apple adopting it for Safari by 2003.

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

<p>“Just months after his 20th birthday, Bill Gates had already angered the programmer community.”</p>
<p>How exactly did he anger the programmer community?</p>
