[belorn]

> "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"

Yes who can do professional interpreters for free. Guido van Rossum could not possible put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, and document his product for free.

This is after all what this letter is about. An interpreter for a programming language, and the complain is about hobbyist and other non-commercial entities using it without paying money for it.

[wmf]

I don't think anecdotes are that helpful at understanding Gates's message here. Yes, today there are open source versions of pretty much all developer tools (and that's something to celebrate, since I remember when a "cheap" C compiler was $500). But there's still plenty of software that has no open source equal; if we had a world where nobody paid for software, much of it wouldn't have ever been written.

[belorn]

When looking back at letters like this, its important to be at least aware of the context. I don't think ignoring the context of the letter is helpful at all in understanding why it was written by Bill Gates.

Taken outside the context, one can surely have a discussion about how much software would be made if developers can't use government help as basis for their business model.

[rafekett]

Guido was a salaried employee of CWI at the time. he made money for his efforts. in fact, he has always been paid to work on Python, at least part of the time.