Bill Gates is obsessed by piracy. In 1975 he wrote on open letter on the piracy of BASIC, which he and Paul Allen had written for the Altair. This was arguably the first home user PC and it had been launched in December of the year previously.
The letter Gates wrote was originally published in MIT's monthly Computer Notes and reprinted in many other national computer publications. In it he said that the value of computer time used in writing BASIC had exceeded US$40,000. That is astounding considering the disk drivers had been written, by his own admission, in something under 15 minutes. This letter made him seriously unpopular with computer hobbyists.