On February 3, 1976, a 20-year-old Bill Gates published 'An Open Letter to Hobbyists' in the Altair users' newsletter of MITS, accusing the early personal-computer community of rampant software piracy. 'As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software,' Gates wrote, estimating that fewer than 10 percent of Altair BASIC users had paid for it and asking, 'Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?' The letter — provoked by hobbyists freely copying Micro-Soft's Altair BASIC — drew an angry response from a computing culture built on sharing, and became an early, defining statement of Gates's hard-line stance on commercializing and protecting software.