Re:CPM was good software on good hardware. (Score 1)

In the case of the Microsoft Basic interpreter (the software that the famous Gates 'You're stealing my software...' letter came from) the software was entirely the creation of Microsoft, and was NOT created in a bazaar community. There are and were other Basic implementations. Gates just had a really good one at the time and wanted to sell it, not give it away. The 'You're stealing...' letter is these days severely distorted for political reasons by people with a contemporary agenda. At the time products like CP/M were severely weakened by the rampant piracy going on. Very, very few CP/M hackers had any original printed material from Digital Research. I could probably sell my original Digital Research CP/M-80 manual for a mint on eBay, because it's an extremely rare document.