After my article "Patent does matter: the case of VisiCalc and Daniel Bricklin" about how the unfortunate Daniel Bricklin missed to become a billionnaire, one would expect me to naturally contrast him with Bill Gates. When I was young I bought a book about the history of Microsoft, I don't have it anymore but I do remember that contrary to Daniel Bricklin, Bill Gates did care about patents. So here a short summary of Microsoft's story:

In the late 1970s, IBM was planning to enter the personal computer market with its IBM Personal Computer, which was released in 1981. IBM needed an operating system for its new computer, which was based on the newly developed, 16-bit architecture of the Intel x86 processor family. After briefly negotiating with another company (the Digital Research Corporation in California), IBM approached Microsoft. Without revealing their ties with IBM, Microsoft executives in turn approached Seattle Computer, which had developed an x86-based operating system, and purchased the operating system for a reported sum of $50,000. Microsoft subsequently licensed the operating system to IBM (which released it under the PC-DOS name) and worked with computer manufacturers to include its own version, called MS-DOS, with every computer system sold.

After Bill Gates - while still a student at Harvard - co-authored with Paul Allen the original Altair BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 in the mid 1970s and the Altair became successful personal computer, Gates and Allen worked on a version of the BASIC language - an easy-to-learn programming language developed at Dartmouth College for teaching purposes. This interpreted computer language would become later the key to Microsoft's early commercial success when it was included in the MS-DOS operating system.

Bill Gates then shocked the computer hobbyist community by insisting that a commercial market existed for computer software and that such software should not be freely copied without the publisher's permission. At the time, the community was strongly influenced by its ham radio legacy and the related Hacker ethic, which insist that innovations and knowledge should be freely shared in the community.

The parallel of this computer hobbyist community and today Open Source Community is striking so is there a probability that history should repeat sooner or later ?