[Knitebane]

Hey, I'm no Gates fan but how do you figure he "stole" the work of others by writing a BASIC interpreter for the Altair?

Because much of the code he used was contributed by others. When those others reused that code, he wrote a cease a desist letter to them, saying that they stole the code.

This kind of activity is precisely why the GPL was invented.

[whd23]

Because much of the code he used was contributed by others. When those others reused that code, he wrote a cease a desist letter to them, saying that they stole the code.

Do you just like making stuff up? Altair users were making copies of the paper tape that Micro-Soft and sharing them. Gates, Allen, and Davidoff wrote and original implementation of a unlicensed programming language and offered it for sale.

Gate's Open Letter