It never occured to me that it wouldn't be really obvious why I
write freeware -- sometimes as little as a one-line improvement
or bug fix, sometimes as much as an entire program.
I started doing it once I read Richard Stallman's original announcement
of the GNU project and thought about its implications. By then, I'd
been on Usenet for several years and the ARPAnet for a couple; it was
already obvious that one day these networks or something similar to
them would grow and coalesce until they covered the planet.
I then realized that if networking was ubiquitous, that software to
run it and make use of all that interconnectivity would be necessary.
(After all, running fast pipes all over the place doesn't do much
good unless you have something to push through them -- and *that*
doesn't do you much good unless you can make sense of it.)
It also became obvious that if a single commercial vendor controlled
this, they'd tried to turn it into a cash cow and would ruin it.
And about the same time, BSD Unix was starting to really become
reliable; we were running it on the so-called "Pur-Dual" dual-cpu
Vaxes, the first multiprocessor UNIX machines in the world, and it
was blowing the doors off much more expensive VMS Vax clusters.
It was also roughly the same time that Unix was getting ported to
anything with a CPU. So it also became obvious that if a global network
got built, it would get built on Unix or something very much like it,
because it would require a portable OS to succeed.
Which is *exactly* what happened. All significant Internet development
since about 1982 has been done on Unix, with no exceptions (so far):
nearly all of the seminal work on TCP/IP happened there; NNTP, NFS, MIME,
HTTP, HTML, IRC, WAIS, PGP, SNMP and a bucket of other key building blocks
were all invented and refined on Unix. So were Perl, tcl/tk, Java, and C++.
That's not an accident. Unix was designed from Day 1 as a "programmer's
workbench", and it has proven its worth as such. Happily, because
the people designing it were smart enough to separate kernel, shell,
utilities, and user interface, it's also good for a heck of a lot more.
It also scales and ports like no other OS has before it. (We were
running 32-processor MIMD-architecture Unix boxes a decade ago. And
I've used Unix on an 8086 machine and on a supercomputer.)
Which is not to say that Unix is the end of the process: I thought that
either Mach or Plan 9 would supplant it, but what happened instead is
that most of Mach's ideas were picked up by Unix developers and used;
and Plan 9 has given way to Inferno, which may yet prove a challenger.
(Some folks say I'm a Unix bigot. I'm not. I'm a quality bigot. I've
abandoned mail for ucbmail, ucbmail for elm, elm for mutt: each time
because I think the latter is demonstrably better.)
So what does this have to do with freeware or open source?
-> The *reason* that so many things happened on Unix was <-
-> that we had the source code. <-
Thanks to the way AT&T and then UCB licensed it, we could modify
anything from device drivers to the scheduler to the mail program
to the shell...*anything*. And we did.
We couldn't do that with any OS. Heck, you can't do that *now* with
any other OS. So even if we really, for some reason, wanted to do
all this with VMS on our Vaxes, we couldn't. And we sure as heck
weren't gonna wait for DEC to get around to it.
So we did it ourselves, for the joy of creating something. For
the challenge. For the hope that we were making the world a better
place. For the hope that we'd change the way computing got done.
Because we believed that knowledge is power and the right place
to put that power was in *everybody's* hands, and the way to get
it there was to wire the planet. Because it was cool. Because
it was fun. Because it seemed like a way to build something that
would outlive all of us. Because nobody stopped us. Because nobody
*could* stop us.
Most of people who did all this aren't names that you will know --
outside of people like Berners-Lee and Gosling and Postel, who have
been justifiably lauded for their achievements. But if it weren't
for Tom Truscott and Mark Horton and Brian Kantor, you wouldn't
have Usenet news, for example. For every name you know, there
are a hundred or a thousand or (now) a million who have
contributed their little (or big) bit.
So for me, the Internet isn't about corporate web sites and e-commerce:
yes, those things exist. I've helped build some of them. But they're
of little significance. The Internet is about information and
knowledge and about getting it to everyone on the planet, and the fact
that Wiley J. Coyote (Supergenius) can now order from Acme online is nice,
and useful, but only an incidental by-product of something much larger.
I like to think -- or rather, I like to dream -- that it can be a
positive force for change, that it can make people's lives better, by
giving them knowledge and therefore power they can't get any other way.
And maybe if we're really, really, really lucky it'll promote some small
measure of increased communication and understanding. Kinda hard
to hate the commies and wanna nuke 'em when they're on your chat list.
Pipe dream? Maybe. I had a few in my younger days. :-) (And yes,
I *did* inhale, that's the point, for cryin' out loud!)
On the other hand, look at the impact other communication technologies
have had on society, and then try to imagine the impact that would
result if all of those occured at once -- which is roughly the magnitude
of what's happening now. For all the time that I spend thinking about it,
I think whatever grandiose ideas I have about the impact of the 'net
are probably far too conservative to be accurate.
So I write freeware because each piece is another brick paving the
road. I can look back here and there and see the ones I've crafted, in
and among a million other ones, and know that I was part of building this.
And that's far more important than what I do in my day job. (Although
sometimes, happily, they overlap.)
And if you wonder why I lash out at Microsoft, it's because
I see them as opposed to everything I stand for. They'd rip out half
the road out to make a buck, or steal others' bricks and claim them
for their own, or try to block off the road and charge a toll. Pick
your analogy: the point is, they're in it ONLY for the money and would
tear the whole thing out if they could profit from it. I find that
unethical and unacceptable.
If I had a trillion dollars, I'd buy them and burn the place to the ground,
and stick Gates' head atop a post outside the ruins as a warning to others.
But I don't. So I do what I can: keep cranking out the bricks, one by
one...along with a few million others, a nice increase from what was
once a few hundred.
I won't get rich doing that: but then again, I'm not trying to get rich...
because even if money mattered to me a lot, it would dissipate soon
enough after I'm gone. But this, I think, will outlive me by quite a bit.
One of the t-shirts distributed at the recent Linux conference in Atlanta
has this one the back:
First they ignore you,
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win.
-ghandi
We have now arrived at line 3.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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