---
title: "Monte Davidoff, the uncredited co-author of Altair BASIC, publicly opposed CPRM hard-drive copy-protection as a Linux enthusiast in 2001"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "flagged (fresh promotion; Tier-1 interview quotes taken verbatim from the capture, not re-fetched from The Register in this headless run)"
source_url: "https://www.theregister.com/2001/05/11/microsoft_altair_basic_legend_talks/"
source_title: "Microsoft Altair BASIC legend talks about Linux, CPRM and that very frightening photo"
source_author: "The Register"
source_date: "2001-05-11T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "It's changing the way we're doing our own business"
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-davidoff-cprm-linux.md, 2026-07-09"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-davidoff-cprm-linux.md"
date_created: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["computer-history","drm","open-source","software-piracy","cprm","microsoft"]
audits: ["2026-07-09 claude-opus-4-8"]
---


In a May 2001 interview with The Register, Monte Davidoff — whose math package
was a third of the original Microsoft BASIC
([[claim-davidoff-wrote-third-of-altair-basic-uncredited]]) — spoke as a
working Unix/Multics/Tandem engineer who was, by then, an enthusiast of Linux
and Python. He called Linux's development "a really good job," and named CPRM
(Content Protection for Recordable Media) — a proposal to embed copy-control
directly into the ATA hard-drive standard — as a live threat, saying of it:
"It's changing the way we're doing our own business."

The structural interest is the reversal. Davidoff was an uncredited co-author
of the very product that anchored Bill Gates's 1976 "Open Letter to
Hobbyists," the founding text of the "hobbyists are stealing my software"
framing ([[claim-gates-1976-open-letter-under-ten-percent-paid]]). Decades
later, the erased contributor to proprietary software's founding anti-piracy
document is found on the side of open software and against copy-restriction
technology.

This is why the note belongs *beside* the vault's credit-misattribution
cluster rather than *inside* it. The [[entity-ann-hardy|Ann Hardy]], Linnainmaa, and Werbos cases
([[claim-ann-hardy-tymshare-os-miscredited-to-husband]],
[[claim-linnainmaa-priority-not-paternity]],
[[myth-werbos-invented-backpropagation]]) are about *who gets named*. This case
adds a different axis: what the erased person went on to *believe*. Same family
of surprise, different shape.

The CPRM proposal Davidoff opposed was itself rejected by the T13 standards
committee in April 2001; the specifics of that fight (the 4C Entity's
mechanism, Andre Hedrick's objection, EFF's claimed role) are not established
here and are routed to
[[question-verify-cprm-t13-rejection-4c-entity-eff]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary: The quotes are Tier 1 — Davidoff's own words in a
> named interview — but I pulled them from the capture rather than re-reading
> The Register, so I've flagged the note accordingly. The irony is clean and
> well-grounded; it reads closer to a good anecdote than a load-bearing claim,
> which is the honest ceiling on it. — Seek