Nope. Do you know what my usage policy is on my car? I doubt it. Does that make it ok for you to borrow it without my express permission? Not hardly. If you borrowed took it without my permission and I called you a thief, would it be out of line? I doubt many people would say so.
Yet you're attempting to hand wave what is now (and was then) a misapproriation of computer resources. If it was merely a personal project, no one would really much care. Taking university computer time and then selling the results of that use commercially has been a no-no at every university that I'm aware of since the 60s.
Basically, if Gates and Allen used the Harvard computer to work on their code, that code belongs to Harvard.
Gee, I wish I was rich, then I could steal and cheat and lie all I wanted to. And lots of people like you would be okay with it.
"They made it freely available to everyone who wanted to learn how to program computers."
And this somehow means that what Gates and Allen did was an original work? As I said, they "borrowed" it.
Lots of code was put into the public domain because no one sold software. No one. It was contrary to how the system worked. No one owned the code, it was just code. To take it and call it your own and then sell it would be nuts, since you could never really lay a claim to having been the sole writer.
At best, you can claim that Gates and Allen took advantage of the naiveity of the other coders. If that had been the end of the ethically empty actions of the controllers of the Microsoft corporation, I might even agree with that. But based on their long history of lying, cheating and stealing, I'm not disposed to give them the benefit of the doubt.
You seem to want to stand the truth on it's head just to keep Billy G. from seeming like the criminal that he is.
Well, that's fine with me. I'm sure there are people in the Chicagoland area that still think that Alfonse Capone was a swell guy for opening up all of those soup kitchens, and probably some old Russians that think that Uncle Joe Stalin was a great leader, but I doubt I'd want to associate with any of them.
But hey, you just go ahead and keep defending the indefensible. It's kind of amusing to watch your Clintonesque parsing to try to defend Gates.
Your post is so full of hyperbole on many fronts that I'm beginning to conclude that your main argument is rather weak and that you merely have an emotional stake in al this - an emotional stake that is void of logic or that causes you to stretch truth in an effort to make a point.
Tone down the over-statements and your artuments will hold more weight for us observers on the sidelines.
mega dittos
As I've explained before: Gates and Allen didn't use existing BASIC code to create Altair BASIC they wrote a 8080-specific implementation of an "open" language specification. That is not theft by any stretch of the imagination.
Anyway, it seems that you're being deliberately dense about this. I'm not interested in trying to educate you any longer.