Just be careful now, Microsoft may sue you for writing free software.
Was reading a CNN artcile that says that MS is consifering lawsuits
to slow down the growth of Linux and Open Software and Fre software.
BAd idea on their part I would think, fire wood to be burned by even more.
-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Kulawiec <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Saturday, November 07, 1998 7:25 PM
Subject: WC:>: Why I write freeware
>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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