alt Hacker NewsImagine if the University had sued for their share of the IP and that was created using their resources…
It’s funny because I thought Jobs/Wozinak got their initial funding from selling phreaking boxes. And more recently, Anthropic engaged in criminal copyright violations with only a slap on the wrist.
Feels like a common theme of every “great” company having its origins from a “boost” resulting from criminal activity. (After all, that’s where the money is!)
Just imagine the criminal penalties possible for pirating and selling one copy of a movie or making one long distance phone call with phreaking.
Replies
dboreham • today at 4:50 PM
See also Airbnb and Uber.
In the case of Microsoft, I'm not seeing it.
Being born into a 1% household and understanding the asymmetric upside that having the money and the time to speculate is far more significant than the civil and criminal legal violations on the way.
The most common way to go from one-percenter rich to .001% rich is to already have enough wealthy people generating capital in your personal network that you can raise capital on sweetheart terms to buy the labor of people who don't.
Then you sell it at a massive premium and repeat.
I think it's empirically dubious to identify the UW mainframes as the secret sauce instead of "being able to ask your mom for a meeting with the chairman of IBM followed by asking her for 80,000 dollars ASAP."
If the original creators of DOS were born into a wealthy family and on a first name basis with the chairman of IBM, do you think they would've sold it to Gates?
Trying to attribute the tech business "founding crime" feels like displacement for what is perfectly legal and accepted cultural practice.