Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose

Not Bill Gates — the League for Programming Freedom League for Programming Freedom Founded 1989 · Software-patent reform group
Disputed In copyright

The sentence circulates as a line from Gates’s internal Microsoft memo “Challenges and Strategy” (16 May 1991), by way of Fred Warshofsky’s 1994 book The Patent Wars. Wikiquote records that as a misreading of Warshofsky’s text ↗ and attributes the wording instead to the League for Programming Freedom’s 1991 paper Against Software Patents.

Last verified 14 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose” League for Programming Freedom, "Against Software Patents" (1991), per Wikiquote; often misattributed to Bill Gates. Via quotle.info · Verbatim: “A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Bill Gates. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by League for Programming Freedom). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of League for Programming Freedom — Software-patent and interface-copyright reform group. Theme: "A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Usually credited to
Bill Gates, “Challenges and Strategy” memo, 16 May 1991
Wikiquote credits
Against Software Patents
Written by
League for Programming Freedom, 1991
Route of the error
A misreading of Fred Warshofsky, The Patent Wars (1994)

A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high. Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.

This is the passage in the form Wikiquote records under Misattributed ↗. We were not able to retrieve the League for Programming Freedom’s 1991 paper directly, so we have not checked the wording against the document itself.

Wikiquote: Bill Gates — Misattributed

How we verified this

  • Wikiquote’s Bill Gates page ↗ lists the sentence under Misattributed, records that it is cited to the “Challenges and Strategy” memo of 16 May 1991 via Fred Warshofsky’s 1994 The Patent Wars, and states that this is a misreading of Warshofsky’s text.
  • The same entry names the actual source as the League for Programming Freedom ↗ (1991), “Against Software Patents”, and points to Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas (2001) as an example of the misattribution appearing in print.
  • We could not read the League’s paper ourselves — the MIT server hosting it is unreachable from our network — so the identification here rests on Wikiquote, not on our own inspection of the 1991 document.
In copyright

Wikiquote identifies the wording as the League for Programming Freedom’s, first published in 1991, which is well inside US copyright — so it is treated as in copyright here. The Gates memo it is usually credited to would likewise be in copyright.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

The line is a favourite exhibit in software-patent arguments — an industry titan apparently conceding that the system is built to crush newcomers. The titan did not write it.

Bill Gates Not his words

Wikiquote lists the sentence under Misattributed ↗ and states that the quotation is actually the League for Programming Freedom’s, not Gates’s.

Fred Warshofsky, The Patent Wars (1994) Mis-sourced

The attribution traces back through Warshofsky’s 1994 book, but Wikiquote calls it a misreading of his text ↗ rather than a claim Warshofsky made himself.

Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas (2001) Repeated, not origin

Wikiquote cites Lessig’s book ↗ as an example of the misattribution in circulation.

The sentence belongs to the League for Programming Freedom’s 1991 paper against software patents — as Wikiquote’s Bill Gates entry sets out ↗.

Context

Why it mattered

The quotation does real work in public argument: it is produced whenever someone wants to show that even the biggest software company understood patents as a toll-gate rather than an incentive. Coming from Gates, it reads as a confession.

Coming from the League for Programming Freedom — a campaigning group founded in 1989 expressly to fight software patents — it reads as what it is: an argument by people who already held that position. That is a different kind of evidence, which is why the mix-up matters.

An argument from a campaign group is not a confession from a monopolist.

Read the full story

Wikiquote’s note is precise about the mechanism. The sentence is cited to Gates’s “Challenges and Strategy” memo of 16 May 1991 through Fred Warshofsky’s 1994 book The Patent Wars, and it is that citation, not the memo, that went wrong: Wikiquote describes it as a misreading of Warshofsky’s text.

Once made, the error was durable enough to reach serious scholarship — Wikiquote points to Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas (2001) as an instance of the line appearing under Gates’s name.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Power Truth Freedom

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote — Bill Gates (Misattributed)en.wikiquote.org

The entry that files this sentence as misattributed and names the League for Programming Freedom as its source.
League for Programming Freedomen.wikipedia.org

Background on the group Wikiquote credits with the line, founded in 1989 to fight software patents.
Bill Gatesen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the man the sentence is usually pinned on.
Software patenten.wikipedia.org

Background on the software-patent debate in which the quotation is normally deployed.

The author

About League for Programming Freedom

League for Programming Freedom

Founded 1989 · Software-patent and interface-copyright reform group

The League for Programming Freedom was founded in 1989 by Richard Stallman to oppose software patents and the extension of the scope of copyright, uniting developers of free and proprietary software alike. Its campaigns included the “Burn all GIFs” protest against Unisys’s enforcement of the LZW compression patent, and it published a newsletter, Programming Freedom, in eleven issues between 1991 and 1995.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

League for Programming Freedom. “Against Software Patents.” 1991. Identified as the source of this sentence in Wikiquote, “Bill Gates,” Misattributed section, accessed 14 August 2026.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A future startup with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose’?” Last verified 14 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-future-startup-with-no-patents-of-its-own-will-be-forced/

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