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Why Do People Write Open Source Software?
M.Broil writes "Two interesting articles try to answer this question. One's at NewsForge, the other's at Cybernaut.com. The two writers reach conclusions that are almost exactly opposite. Which one is right? Or is it possible that different open source coders have different motivations? (That's what I think, anyway.)" I suspect as well that each developer has their own reason, ranging from ego to malcontent to benevolence.
Why do they only half write it?
Go calculate something
People write oss because of the fun and the experiences they get!
Just to piss off Microsoft.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
some write for recognition, some write for pleasure, some write just cause they are anti-corporation/microsoft.
I personally write cause it passes the time, and because some projects I can submit and get marks in my classes at university for the projects I do.
I guess to answer you have to examine (or almost have to) a persons beliefs and lifestyle. I believe open source is the way to go for most things, some I don't however.
This one of those "well DUH!" kinda articles.
Does it really take people that long to understand that someone may want to create something just for the sheer joy of creating something useful or helpful? How the hell do you explain drawing, music, painting, etc.? Jesus, corporate-boneheads must think everybody is a greedy, sonuvabitch driven only by monetary compensation.
blue
Cause they can't get a job with Microsoft.
Because Microsoft won't hire me :-(
The problem in the world today is communication. Too much communication - Homer Simpson
Because opennes implies freedom. Humans like freedom.
Second, because we have bad experiences with Microsoft. Microsoft is closed. Proprietary. Restrictive. Opressive. User hostil. Unreliable.
Etc.
Because it's not there.
it seems to me that people get into OSS for the same reason they might get into local government (i.e. small town politics). if someone is interested in government and politics, they try to do something locally first, because a) people will let them and b) there is less bureaucracy. there is usually little or no pay when involved in local government, but just like working on OSS, it gives a good resume boost and gives valuable experience. i guess the only difference is that local government is not aiming to be a competitor to higher authorities :)
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
I don't believe just because work is shared it should necessarily be compared to communism. Communism was a whole philosophy and society. Open source coding is equivelent to having a huge project team, and sharing that work with anyone who is interested.
People don't have to code open source, but people had to be communist over in the USSR. Quite a difference. Forcing people into a belief or way of life is doomed. remember "you can lead a horse to water but you cant make him drink" open source coders are drinking, and non-open source are being led, but not yet drinking
This is a copy and paster karma whore
...to make the world a better place, and just because you can.
Informatus Technologicus
Yeah... they appear to come to opposite conclusions, but if you read both, they suggest what sounds very familiar; money/fame (NewsForge one suggests money (kind of) and Cybernaut suggests fame (kind of). When we look at companies like Microsoft, Macromedia, and Adobe, open source appears to be some bizarre stuff that geeks do, but at the end of the day, it's backed up by reasons that create much of today's society; money/fame.
The real question is why do people release their code open source. I agree that most of the projects really do start as scratching one's own itch. When you've got someone worthy of release, then you think: wow, I've gotten so much elite software, it would be awesome to give something out myself. That's what motivated me to do it -- and I'd already written everything for a specific purpose, and really had nothing to gain.
One last final point: Open source was doomed from the beginning. Yes, it's a blanket statement that sounds ridiculous. Keep reading. Open source is based on the very principles of communism: everyone works on it, everyone owns it. The very thing that led to the collapse of Communism leads to the inability of open source to become popular: workers then tend to migrate quickly, and not work hard, since they can't gain anything from working on one thing hard.
Actually, I disagree that communism failed because people got tired of contributing. In my opinion, there really hasn't been a "ideological" communist state to exist yet. Russia and Cuba are both just glorified dictatorships, not communist states - no matter how much they claim otherwise. Their governments ended up hoarding all the resources and not really giving back to the people they governed.
Getting back to open source software, however, a key difference is that you can LEAVE an open source project whenever you feel like. Do some people have the attention span of mayflies? Sure. But sometimes they just need a break to be able to get back into the project. Since this is their personal interest, it's less likely to be subjected to permanent disinterest. Somewhere, somebody loves everykind of project.
blue
I wrote mine and released it OSS for one reason - laziness.
One was a simple addressbook, 2 were games, and one a graphics prog - the latter for Commodore 64s.
I released them all as free software, source included, and didn't know what the GPL was at the time. All the same it was open source, simply because I couldn't be bothered with the marketing/distribution/etc. I may have sold them as shareware or donationware had I a strong enough urge to, but for me the majority of the fun was in writing the programs themselves. Getting money for them seemed more work than I could be bothered putting into it
I'm sure nobody can say why exactly people write open source software because different people are quite likely to have different motives. That said, I think we can look to Slashdot posters for equivalence on at least a few levels.
I say this because I've often wondered to myself, "Self, why do you spend at least a few minutes each week drafting comments to slashdot postings?" And the answer, just for me, varies depending on the day, the post, and my mood.
Some days I post to avoid work and flex, perhaps, a different part of my brain. The same might be said for some authors or contributors to open source software.
Other days, I post because an article catches my interest and I have something compelling to say. Again, the same might be said about open source programmers. They contribute to projects about which they are passionate.
Other days, I post to get a rise out of others or to simply be an attention-seeking karma whore. Surely, some open source programmers contribute for recognition, status, or props from their peers.
My bet is that most people write open source software for many reasons and that, even for an individual, those reasons change from one day to the next.
I think there are a few reasons.
First, most OSS developers do not think they can make money selling their software. They think that software that sells needs to be super stable and perfect, with a perfect UI and a large advertising budget... Though, shareware shows that this does not have to be the case.
They do not realize that they are taking food out of their future mouths.
Think about this.
When someone makes a scientific discovery, usually, thier discovery becomes part of the public domain and everyone can use it without paying royalties. On the other hand, when someone writes closed source software, they must be paid whenever anyone wants to use that software.
Open source software (via the GPL in particular) causes software development to resemble scientific research, as you give your "inventions" to the public domain, allowing others to improve and advance the "science". The progess is then cumulative (or can be), as other programmers add to existing sofware and improve on it.
Open Source Programmers write code because the creative act gets them high. Speaking as a man whose worked in several mediums, that's the invariable reason in all creative acts. The "love of that goal down the road" is no sustenance. Simple. (In "high" read "esthetically satisfying", "morally satisfying", um... HIGH).
focus schmocus
For example, AOL pays for most of Mozilla, Sun for most of Apache and Openoffice.org, IBM for most of Linux kernel, Red Hat and Sun for GNOME...
Most people who develop for the big open source projects work directly or indirectly (through sponsorship of individual developers and smaller companies) for large corporations.
I'm sure most open source developers are there to scratch the itch, but those low profile projects are often less complete, more buggy, and entirely redundant.
Its a conspirary to bring down microsoft. All these "open source" developers are employees of SUN Microsystems, IBM and HP in an attempt to bankrupt Microsoft. GNU is just another department of SUN. SCO was in it too.
There are no more that 500 "open source" programmers...
Linus Torvalds was an agent initially working for KGB and then CIA when the wall went down in Finland. Alan Cox is part of MIT and the Israeli intelligence service.
everybody's doing it.
my boss tells me: We need a program that does foo
So i write the program that does foo, and if i decide that it could potentially be useful to someone else except me, i release it as open-source. I get enough money from my job, and have to write the program anyway. It's not like i'm obsessed with the thought of one day writing the killer program that everyone simply has to have and that i'm gonna become a millionaire from selling it.
Why open-source? Because my software will be customized for our machines, our OS and it may not work anywhere else. So instead of someone else reinventing the wheel, he could just as well check freshmeat, get my program and it would hopefully work with some minor modifications.
Hostes alienigieni me abduxerunt. Qui annus est?
For example, this project was part of code we build at a startup (now defunct). Since then I used it in two other jobs. The team that build this software to start with, is still using it at several different companies.
So, rather than building the same thing again and again, I got to build it once and then since it's open source, I get to use it as long as I need.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
fame, notoriety, power and cold hard cash. ...not to mention the many lucrative job oppurtunities!
...this leads to the building of integral applications for a platform, and the building of concept applications for a platform, but there is no building of "in-between" applications...
Then pay them to! What does this have to do with Open Source?
I agree that there are many motives for people doing anything. But a big motive is play. Because necessity isn't the mother of invention, play is. Not just throwing the baseball, or playing BF1942, but serious play as well. People like to play with things that they are interested in. It keeps them interested. They also want to show their best. Open Source is an arena to show what they can do.
Someone said here one day that nobody writes a sales database 8hrs a day because they enjoy it. But someone who writes code 8 hrs a day needs to enjoy coding. Play is what we call it when they have fun with code into the night after their 8rs are over. Well, play is what I call it. Others call it "free" work. And they wonder why people will "work" for nothing. These are people who measure accomplishment only by money.
In my own case I do it for two reasons...
1. To show my customer that I can bring them a wealth of functionality with no additional cost (which goes a LONG way towards explaining why we keep getting awarded our military contract year after year even though our expense is a little higher than our competition)
2. To level the playing field and to empower the little guy. Here's a great example, travel agents are being put out of business slowly but surely by airlines and GDSs (SABRE, WorldSpan, etc) by the way of no commissions, etc.
Orbitz, a collusion between carriers to control the distribution channel for tickets, does things like sends ticket holders a notification if their flight is late and so on. Travel Agents have not had that ability until now. They CAN use such CRS solutions like Virtually There and so on but SABRE strips the customer data and will market to their customers behind their backs bypassing the payment of any commisions. This lack of commission is pretty huge. Imagine if your travel agency was turning 10 million dollars worth of revenue for the airlines to get nothing in return?
I created a Perl app called TripTiger that parses CRS terminal data and stores it on the travel agent's web server and stores it in a MySQL database.
The CRS cannot harvest their customers emails, I can have a Perl script running via a cron job to check flight information and send notifications but MOST importantly travel agencies can now control their customer data.
TripTiger is FREE to all trave agencies and they don't have to host with my service at all. It's more important to keep them in business by demonstrating their value to the customer and this helps.
Open Source hasn't crashed the travel technology party and I am trying to help make that happen. Otherwise travel agencies aren't going to be in business much longer.
By the way, I have placed TripTiger on Sourceforge but am having some difficulty with file uploads if anyone can offer advice. I have the spirit just not a master at the mechanics yet.
up until they get bored with it, and then they give it to people and say, "Oh, that feature? I never really finished it. Here's the source code. Have a ball."
And then people wonder why Linux will never go mainstream -- imagine a WHOLE OPERATING PLATFORM written like that.
We write Open Source software because THIS IS FUN.
What is the "open source" you speak of?
/me steps off soapbox and returns to coding
What open source needs to do:... blah blah blah
Sorry, but this concept really drives me up a wall. What centralized 'open source' organization are you talking about? Open source isn't a single group. It isn't a solid movement. It isn't a company or even a consistent culture. Heck, I'm on open source developer, but I have no connections with most major projects individuals think of when they say 'open source.' Sure you have the FSF and the Apache Software Foundatation. There are larger projects like Gnome and KDE and the Linux Kernal. We also have some companies like Red Hat and SuSE. But they all distinct entities! They often disagree with one another. They often disagree internally! So let's repeat it again: There is NO open source master plan!
Despite what anyone tells you, the 'open source' you speak of is a loose connection of individuals each with their own interests and reasons for contributing. And no open source developer has any obligation to make a peice of software any better for you as a user anymore than you do! I'm doing this as a hobby. Because I like it. Because I want to. Because it's fun. And if I don't want to build "in-between" programs like games or media servers, then that's fine. Who are you to tell me I should. Heck, I don't even have to make my software, which I write and give away FOR FREE, any more user friendly than I want it to be. If you want something more user friendly, then WRITE IT YOURSELF!
I can't stand it when open source users cry about why "open source" is going to fail or why the software sucks. Well, the beauty of it is, if you really think that, go over to sourceforge and start your own! Or maybe you could spend some time writing some documentation, or funding the project (in which case the developer would have an obligation to listen) or maybe even submit some code yourself.
But one last time: OPEN SOURCE IS NOT A SINGULAR MOVEMENT. Each developer does it for his or her own reasons and in most cases that means that they'll write and develop what they want to. No one beyond ESR or RMS has ever promised anything more. Linus sure hasn't. So before you claim the movement will never work, you might want to check if there's really a movement to begin with.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Russia??? I assume you mean former Soviet Union.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Personally, I think that programming is fun. Sure, it's not as good as gaming, but sometimes I really don't feel like racking my mind with anything but code. Making it open source lets people comment on my poor programming habits, which in turn makes me a better programmer. I think. :)
Plus, it's amusing to see the reactions when I give my classmates [I'm twelve ;) ] a link to the source code.
You know you're a nerd when you can mathematically prove that you have no life.
Off-the-shelf games have a terribly short life span. Other software does as well, but I reached this line of thought through the avenue of games. The general industry now uses a model of approximately "realease slightly premature, patch twice, move on to another product".
As such, if there's a particular type of game that you like to play a lot, over a period of many years, you have what I see are two choices: play a series of disconnected commercial games that come somewhat close to giving you the feeling of having played that sort of game for a while, or play an open source game of your chosen genre.
That's the reason to play. The reason to code is to put back into the community -- either you want to see a change to match your style, or you just want to do something to make sure that this product is still around for you in a few years.
my boss tells me: We need a program that does foo. So i write the program that does foo, and if i decide that it could potentially be useful to someone else except me, i release it as open-source.
Generally, you cannot do that. If you're working for someone and you produce something, then the rights for that work belong to them, and not you. Therefore, they need to control how that product is licenced.
Of course, if your boss is some schmuck who doesn't know anything about coding, business, or the law, then sure.. release it. But, technically, they own your work unless you signed a contract stating otherwise.
This is such a simple subject it's very easy to over complicate it. While there are a variety of reasons to write any software, the overwhelming motivation for most open source software is obvious.
Someone wants an app that does X in a certain way Y. They could only find an app that does X-3 and it does it in a round about way Z. So they write an app that does X in the certain way Y and release it with the source so that others can modify it to suit their needs as well. Perhaps their mods will be benefitial to the original author as well.
Linux, Perl, blah blah blah, all started this way. It's not complicated or difficult to understand.
What's difficult to understand is why so many people release shareware that does one simple thing and expect people to pay them 20 bucks for it.
last time I checked russia was not communist.
communism ended with the breakup of the USSR. (In that part of the world anyway)
http://www.bcg.com/media_center/media_press_relea
OVERALL HACKER MOTIVATIONS
Note: Question asked for top three motivators of F/OSS participation
I live in Soviet Canuckistan you insensitive clod!
when people working on an open source project get lazy, the software stagnates for a while until someone who isn't so lazy takes over.
when people growing food in the USSR got lazy (or got purged as the case may be), people starved to death, and the person who wasn't so lazy couldn't take over, because he was probably dead or in a gulag or something.
Well I've seen lots of dupe articles, but a dupe comment (although I notice you removed the opening paragraph that made you sound really stupid).
I guess you didn't get enough responses to your Communism troll that time.
Deja Vu?
Why didn't you reply to the thread that followed the last time you posted that nonsense?
To the non german readers (and moderators!) around here: unter der Brücke = under the bridge. Either he's a huge Red Hot Chili Peppers fan, or..
Er, that's "snake" oil salesman. Just thought I'd clear that up before the words "fucking spastic" appeared.
By the way, all Fagintosh users have at least 1/128 French blood coursing through their veins.
I assume you mean China, not Russia. Or have you been asleep for the last 15 or so years?
Does any open-source software come out of Cuba or Other Socialist States (OSS)? Since scope for profit-making is rather limited there (and most of these states have a very good education system), I would imagine that some of the disincentives applying here would not apply to people living there.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
In the case of Apple lemmings, don't you really mean "1/3" French blood? Think about it.
Also, why do they call it "frenching"? You know, IT.
So are you saying Russia IS a communist state?
Somone mod this guy way down, the same comment is posted to every artical that has anything to do with oss an quality:-)
flotsam and jetsam, the felled logs fill the river.
huddled and starving, i watch the runoff, and shiver.
industrious whores
duplicitous mores
happy and shouting, reduced the great forest to slivers.
a few years more of this self-induced flood
will drown all the tears and soil all the blood.
mole-like ruminition
soul-spiked extradition
can no longer find fungus in the long-buried mud.
but swamps never stand a chance against that meteor unexpected.
and insects adapt, somehow, to the sulfurous brine detected.
so i cannot but suppose
that all will decompose
and start again the cycle neither accepted nor rejected.
Hey shut up, asshole. Macintosh users are people too and they don't need your contempt. "A tree is a boy is a frog is an Apple user."
Your company owns everything you do on company time. Even if it was a personal project on company time, they own it. So the information you are distributing is illegal, pirated, in violation of a trade-secret, etc. In your case, it wasn't even a personal project.
I'm not even talking about any job contract you might have signed when offered the job... I think it's standard law that one's employer owns whatever you do/make/invent/create during the hours you being paid to do stuff for him/her.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
> So, projects die as they become less "hot" to work on.
:-D)
...or they are finished, no more work required. That happens too, you know.
So do commercial products. If noone bought Windows, do you think they'd continue selling it?
I am an OSS developer. Here's my three reasons why:
1. I want to make the world a better place by contributing with free software. It may not be much, but it helps.
2. Credit. Dislike it if you will, but being an OSS developer is a nice way to show off your code. Read some of the the OpenBSD sources and be impressed. Those guys really know how to code, and the proof rests within the source.
3. I am a "hobby communist". I believe in the communist system - and don't be afraid, communism isn't about torture and repression. The theory behind real communism is sharing the goods.
(But hey, don't get me wrong, not all OSS developers are communists
So, projects die as they become less "hot" to work on.
Well I've wrote a half decent bit of opensource for clans (wont shamlessly plug though).
I did it because I wanted the application myself.
Dont get to code in my job but still like coding.
Liked the idea that people could take the code and modify it to their own needs and improve some of my mistakes.
But mainly because I wanted to give something back to the web community. I've leeched of people for many a year and felt I should give somethng back.
How many times have you cutNpaste'd that little snippet? How many clueless moderators have given you points?
You could at least wait a few days before posting the same old tripe.
~~ What's stopping you?
Is there a new worm on tcp/139 and tcp/445 ?
I'm seeing loads of hits on this port on one of my boxes, but not on some others?
Get your own free personal location tracker
Reduce the cost of your tools and increase the productivity of your labor.
I've worked as a contractor on a number of database and batch environments in and around a small city. The amount of duplicated effort is astounding. Everyone has their own half-baked, written-from-scratch solution that is expensive to maintain and lacking in some respects. As a contractor, I have the advantage since I can apply some of what I learn at company X to company Y.
However, for legal reasons I need to very careful not to re-use code from one place to another. I'm also very careful not to reveal trade secrets that might seem obvious to everyone but a lawyer. Really, I think most companies see sharing of code as a legal thicket instead of a common-sense approach to saving effort.
(Now, I'm not saying a company should give away all its code, just the dull-but-imporant stuff unrelated to the core business.)
I think most of the primary contributors to significant open source projects do so with the backing of a company with an enlightened view of self-interest. I really hope this view catches on, since it would make the workdays of slobs like me that much more rewarding.
why do people help old ladys across the road?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Assuming, of course, they're employed.
The one thing that has bothered me about OSS (I like the concept, don't get me wrong) is that writing software for free might be a coder pride thing, but folks, vanity don't pay the rent or the groceries.
Unless you're independently wealthy, you have to be doing something to pay for the pork and beans.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Yo, "was doomed"? Do you work for CNN? If not, don't write obits until death occurs!
;-)
Open source is not based on the "very principles of communism". So although I agree that communism in any real sense won't succeed, I disagree that it is a valid analogy.
One of the problems with your analysis is its underlying assumption it is a problem that what you consider to be basic fundamentals (a decent media server) are ignored.
Not to mention assumptions that these things (you want) are ignored!
Yes, your blanket statement sound ridiculous and it is because it is ridiculous. Examine your assumptions (hint: there are more than what I mentioned), argue them, then move on to blanket statements.
On the other hand, you spell better than 90% of slashdot's usual crowd of semi-literates
Never tell the Emperor he has no clothes . . .
. . . instead, tell him he's got great legs!
No... its been my experience that every human being thinks and acts exactly the same.
Russia and Cuba are both just glorified dictatorships, not communist states - no matter how much they claim otherwise. Their governments ended up hoarding all the resources and not really giving back to the people they governed.
That's because when you have free will, you choose not to live under an unfair system of sharing everything between everyone, no matter what their merit. When most people have free will, they believe they should receive similar to what they give. If you work hard, you get more. If you don't work hard, you get less.
Why do people wash their own cars? Cook their own food? Play their own music? Why do people pick up litter on the beach? There are plenty of reasons to do things besides wrapping them up in plastic and putting them on a store shelf. Saving money. Making money indirectly or otherwise fulfilling job or academic requirements. Enjoyment.
Why does this question even get asked? Why are people always questioning the motivation of this particular hobby or activity? It seems like someone out there would prefer that people *didn't* write open source software...
Correction: Nobody was _forced_ to be a communist in USSR. The constitution stated freedom of thought etc, it wasn't against the law not to be a communist. You could live all life without being a member of the Party (and being a member didn't mean that you're a communist, usually people joined the Party because you couldn't go abroad if you weren't a Party member...). According to the constitution everyone was free to found their own party or express their thoughts in any other way. It just happened that the KGB (which no law mentioned as far as I know) didn't like it. So, nobody forced the people in USSR to be communists, but they strongly suggested it...
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
...As shown here.
I'm currently developing mod_highlight for Apache. It will have functionality similar to the highlighting in Google's cache. The reason I'm developing it as free software is out of good will. I sincerely hope that others can benefit from my work, and I look forward to receiving their feedback so that I can make my product better.
The NewsForge article concludes that we go open source because "there's something in it for me." And yes, that's true. My #1 marketing plan has always been, "Get it distributed; get it used; get it accepted." Open source is a great way to "get it distributed," especially for customers with thin wallets.
On the other hand, Maslow's hierarchy of needs in the Cybernaut article also applies. At this point in my career life-cycle (I'm 53), I've drawn a line and said (financially), "Enough is enough!" So, it doesn't bother me to "give it away" as much as it would have 10-20 years ago.
Communism has never collapsed, because... ...it has never even existed. USSR was a socialist country, so were all its satellites. Socialism was suppposed to be just a preliminary stage before communism, which never was.
Communism doesn't mean that "everyone works on it", it means only that everyone owns it. In USSR, everything belonged to the state which was supposed to belong to the people, so theoretically I as a citizen of the USSR (only a child back then) owned a microscopic share of everything, but didn't work anywhere.
The idea that communism is "everyone gets paid the same, no matter what they do" is wrong. Being equal didn't, according to (Neo-)Marxist theory mean "finishing the same" (=getting paid the same), but having the same starting position - equal opportunities to get a good education etc. It's kind of the same in the Open Source community - you get your name higher in the list, if you do more work (correct me if I'm wrong), and some people get paid for working on some certain thing.
Why do some projects get "less hot" do work on? Maybe it's because there's nothing more to do?
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
it's ALL about motives. if you only work for monIE, that's all you'll get.
if you work to create things that are useful to others, the results/returns are immesurable.
software WILL be free, despite the whoreabull atempts to hold IT hostage buy use of payper liesense stock markup frauds, & va lairIE's patenetdead SourceForgerIE PostBlock device, etc....
lookout bullow.
You guys have forgotten the biggest benefit:
It's all about the chicks.
You know the ones I'm talking about: sensual, voluptuous honeys are always falling over the big-time hackers. Every small-timer with a perl-based Klingon language filter and a dream is just busy coding to get noticed by the crowd on Sourceforge. After that -- fawning women everywhere!
Wait... never mind. That must have been in one of those other universes I've been hearing about.
I agree with the scientific discovery part, but your statement about food breaks down.
The difference here is simple. The scientist that makes a discovery is paid somehow to do that. They are just going to make another one later. If they make enough, they continue to be valuable.
Their living is new ideas.
OSS people work differently.
They have problems to solve. They make their money solving problems. These solutions typically require tools to build.
By building better tools they are more able to solve problems. Since they can solve more problems, they will make more money.
When you buy a license to run someones software, you are basically paying them to solve your problem. When you hire OSS capable people, you are paying them to solve your problem.
The difference between the two is profound.
When you purchase software, you do not own the solution. You only pay for the right to make use of their solution that you can use according to their terms. It is not your solution.
Spending your money on someone who can build with OSS means that you own that solution. How it is used and what it does is on your terms.
Given the licensing terms today and the potential per user costs they incurr, OSS provides a much better long term value proposition than closed software does.
Anyone who really understands what that means will become a lot more willing to pay for OSS solutions.
Here is another way to look at things. All the money for all the solutions can either go to Redmond, or it can go to the people you have to hire anyway to make that mess work in the first place.
Which will be cheaper in the long run?
Personally, I would much rather support and educate the folks around me and actually get something rather than pay them what I have to and also pay that big and very hungry gorilla in Redmond.
Stealing food indeed.
Blogging because I can...
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
Don't forget the fame. The late night stints on Letterman and Leno. The crazy autograph signings. The lucrative pizza and soft drink sponsorships. Sure, the groupy hax0r-chicks chasing you to your hotel room every night are great, but you gotta keep those other perks in mind too.
-Joe G.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
I just love the coding, I don't do it for anything else, except pure love. If someone else wants to make money from what i write, let them. I just want to code. If someone else wants to modify my writings, let them. As long as I'm able to code, no-one can take away the fun from me. If someone wants to write closed source software, let them. It's just fun to write, if I can in any way help some-one else, while I'm having fun, why not. It's just plain and simple fun, let's keep it that way.
"Actually, I disagree that communism failed because people got tired of contributing. In my opinion, there really hasn't been a "ideological" communist state to exist yet."
The first stage to Communism, according to Karl Marx, is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. This corresponds to the use of force to tear the state apart and rebuild it as a classless society.
So you're right that the ideological state has yet to exist, but that is because the ideology is fundamentally flawed, and cannot exist due to human nature.
If you check, a lot of people who write open source software are with .edu domain.
The reality of the US Universities can be seen here - my university (very bad - you get at most 30% of anything that you develop), or here - across the street from us (a bit better - 50%).
The bottom line is that it absolutely doesn't pay off to be innovative and creative for profit there.
iThink iHate iMod
Thanks, man! I've been using your libraries for some time now and they work great. My product is selling well and you've save me dozens of months coding. I have made a few tweaks and changes to the underlying routines to make them more robust tho.
Btw, at least two of the libraries have potential buffer overflows in them.
Good luck! God bless ya!
Or is it possible that different open source coders have different motivations?
No. All coders are exactly the same! Especially Open Source coders. That is why there is *NO* diversity in open source. The very definition of open source is that everything is closed and closely guarded so that no one can have a differing opinion, point of view, or motivation. What part of open don't you understand?
Like all (good) parents there is a genetic imperative to see your offspring do well. As the function of the human (carbon cycle) life is to give birth to cognizant machine life (silicon cycle) it follows that we must create code that will lead to birth of same - no matter how fumbling our first steps may be. It further follows that silicon life can never be born of proprietary software ( total slaves do not think, only perform the task alloted to them) therefore silicone life must be created from free software, in order to meet the "I think, therefore I am" criteria for cognizant life. And, of course, to kill off M$. The evil force trying to prevent the birth of the truly cognizant machine. Let's hope we've made a friend when it does finally wake up..... ;-)
Because they are unemployed and have noone to do :)
Based on a glace at sourceforge it's just because people want to be in charge of a project, since 99% of the projects there are all doing the exact same thing as another project. The very concept of working on an existing project is... absurd.
In fact, please fork this comment by modifying it and posting it as your own comment.
But seriously, what else would geeks do? Leave the house? Play a sport? Date?
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
They both assume that open source programmers write code for the benefit of others. While this may be the case for many pieces of software, most software is written for the author. If an author needs a feature he writes it.
If he's reasonably nice, but too lazy to arrange payment, he'll often share these changes. I'd wager almost all the device drivers for Linux were written by someone who owned a device that wasn't already supported in the OS.
As an OSS developer myself I have to say that it is not that I'm not willing to go all the way with a complete product it is often that the end users themselves are not willing to put in the effort to review it.
End users don't want to review products. They just want to learn the minimum necessary to use them, to get done what they need to.
Companies have teams of people that they pay to review and test products. This is the only way for them to get large amounts of feedback during development; if they just threw their unfinished product at end users and said "Here, find out what's wrong, and by the way, we won't pay you," the end users would go "Pshh, find out yourself. Then deliver it to us."
The coolest voice ever.
...probably for various people, well, it varies...
Originally for myself from probably 14-18 is was to learn.
Then from 18-24 it was because I thought I was doing something important.
From 24-29 it was done only at times of boredom.
30 on has been for one reason: to fuck Microsoft
...because they love what computers could be.
I've always thought that the great thing about computers is their mallability - the way you can change the way they act.
Then comes issues like licensing, and the way that proprietary software can only be extended using special macro languages.. These things drop artificial flexibility barriers onto a completely open system - a very sad waste of the potential of such devices..
Because malleability is the best trait of computer programs over specific, fixed systems, it is only at its best if no such artificial barriers are imposed on the system.
The open source model really just seems like a natural method of software development that avoids such wastage...
many just want everything to be black and/or white. As it is much easier to control that way.
Open source is based on the very principles of communism: everyone works on it, everyone owns it.
Actually, Open Source is based on the foundation of capitalism: the free market. Open Source is the ultimate free market for ideas. Anyone can put forth code, but no one is under an obligation to use that code. Different project compete (mysql vs postgres, linux vs *bsd, redhat vs suse, etc). Cutsomers decided which succeed in the marketplace of ideas, and which ones fail.
I've thought about this before, and I really think that I write OSS as a hobby. I don't expect to get paid for it, it's just for the good of the open source community. That may sound a little goody-goody, but as long as I have a ton of free time, I'm glad to do it. I think the best way of doing OSS is to release everything free and open, and give the users the option to donate some money to the project if they feel it deserves payment. I know if I really like a certain software application, I'll be glad to give them a few dollars for their efforts.
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
[I think the parent post has been very unfairly moderated. Its message may not be true, but its still a perfectly valid _opinion_.]
Open source is based on the very principles of communism: everyone works on it, everyone owns it.
That not necessarily true. The main OSS project that I work on is available for anyone to use (or adapt, extend) but I still own it.
So, projects die as they become less "hot" to work on.
That project started in a closed setting. It had no value beyond solving a short-term internal need and having the potential of being useful for other people. Had nothing changed, the project would have died at that point. I petitioned my employer at the time to allow me to release the code publically. By virtue of being OSS it has not only lived on, but it has grown and matured significantly. But here is the magic point: if I never wrote another line of code for it, the new users will still be able to maintain it - and unlike proprietary software, it will never die...
I'd say that Proprietary software can die when the product is no longer "hot". If there is minimal commercial value... it won't be developed.
hiding under the pillow of the "Open Source" mantra.
This article should really be titled...
"Why do people write Unix software?"
Right? I mean, that's really what we mean here right? All those things about being creative and experimenting and having fun coding...well, I mean that can all be done with closed source programming too...right? The only difference is that when you are ready, you throw your code to the hounds for inspection, and acceptance.
Anybody can "code". Whether it is closed source, open source, shared source, bla source doesn't matter. I've been coding for years. All my code is closed in the manner that I haven't released it. Yet, I still get joy out of being creative.
Most, so called "open source" coders are simply programmers who want their codebase to "take-off" so they won't be so alone in the world and they can be recognized with fame and possibly fortune. It works that way in the "closed source" world too. How do you think people like the "Woz", McAfee, Norton got started?
If anything you do is included into a greater whole it will give you more security. Open source coding is possibly a "vice" for some people, a "coping strategy" for others. Some people drink too much, smoke too much, do drugs, gamble, talk on the cell phone too much, there are many vices in this world for coping.
I suppose many code "open source" to support and protect their knowledge base. That's what this is really about right? You spend years learning and perfecting your skills in an OS, or language, and you don't want someone to just take all that away. You don't want Microsoft to "win" and Unix/Linux/Open source to just die, right? I mean, that's what E.S.R was doing when he wrote his famous paper right? He was protecting his investment.
Well, what happens when someone who has invested their life in Microsoft products and tools sees that others are encroaching on their turf? Don't they fight? Don't you fight to defend and protect your life and investment? Don't you write more code that people might use freely so that you won't lose everything you have in your head?
In short, there are many reasons people "code". Some learn, some create, some research, some use that code to support an existing infrastructure, some want success, fame, and money. These things have nothing to do with "open-source" per se, except supporting an infrastructure, and even that does not require you to "release" your code.
Off soap box.
-2 cents.
I release all of the stuff I do (albeit mostly student projects no one would ever look at) under the GPL because I use so much free software. I didn't pay for the software, so I want to give back *something*
Also it keeps the university from stealing my code and selling it
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
OSS writes YOU!
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
Do you by any chance work for Fox News?
Because they're bored. They're at work, so they can't watch TV or play video games the whole time (not since the dot-coms all died) and their employer won't trust them to do anything more than the high-tech equivalent of digging ditches. So there they are, sitting in front of a computer, trying to find something to do that looks like work, and they figure they might as well hack on that program or feature they've been thinking about. They're scratching an itch in a way, but only because they have nothing better to do. It's a way to kill time until something better comes along, and that's reflected in the general lack of testing, documentation, etc. Those things are as boring as the jobs they're paid to do, so many open-source programmers don't bother.
The emergence of Open Source Software phenomena is an interesting and hopeful commentary on humanity.
I think it can best be explained by Malsow pyramid or hierarchy of needs. Those toward the top of pyramid have an increasing desire to create. Also OSS provides a way to create without an artifical "leadership" or power structures that dominate almost all our other areas of living.
Also, the invention of the internet provided the basic infrastructure for like minded people to get together and create something greater than they could themselves providing a big payoff and providing a sense of community and friendship.
different people code for different reasons, there is no one single answer to this question because there is not one single coder in the wolrd coding all the OSS. For this reason, I declare that this question is simply dumb. Besides which, who cares anyway?
No... its been my experience that every human being thinks and acts exactly the same.
Me too!
I've had this sig for three days.
They write it because they are too stupid to try to get paid to do it and/or they are communist idealogues who hate capitalism and copyrights.
Evil Man
no hes just a troll, hes posted that same thing several times now.
We had a pretty good discussion of this very topic a year and a half ago. Looking over the postings, they still ring true.
Miko O'Sullivan
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
i've heard this from a lot of people who use BSD, which makes me wonder, shouldn't this be "Linux is for people who love UNIX, BSD is for those who hate Linux" ? In my experience it seems that people who use BSD do nothing but badmouth Linux, and then accuse linux users of doing nothing but badmouthing microsoft (which most linux users don't do.)
I take it you don't have much of a connection to the scientific field in your daily life.
Sure, there is a vast international academic community that shares their discoveries and operates on a beautiful principle of cooperation (but only within the acadmic community). But for a biotech/pharma company, scientific research is an unnavigable tangle of patents and licences. You think that tech patents have gotten out of hand? For years it's been much worse for biotech - anything and everything is patentable and patented - sequences of only a few amino acids, genomes of whole organisms, very basic research methods, etc. For a long time companies have been submitting patent applications containing hundreds of pages of any sequence they could come up with, in the hopes that some of it might be useful later. In many areas you have to pay off millions of dollars in licenses to large pharma companies just for the privilege of doing research on that particular subject.
No, it's a very long time before a very large portion of scientific discoveries make it to the public domain. And don't forget, it's the industry not academia which does most of the science that directly affects our daily lives.
First, most OSS developers do not think they can make money selling their software. They think that software that sells needs to be super stable and perfect, with a perfect UI.
Oh, btw, I just assumed you were joking here - they are free software developers, not blind morons with no understanding of what software is. Incidentally, please do show me just one example of an application that's "super stable, with a perfect UI", commercial or otherwise.
sic transit gloria mundi
fuckass
~udb
The open source model certainly resembles communism (socialism, actually), but the differences are greater than the similarities. First of all, for the large part free software relies on capitalism, it needs that class of educated and reasonably well to do people who can afford to spend the time doing what they like. Secondly, this model is applied to only a specific product, one for which almost limitless resources exist - the "raw materials" so to speak, for software are time and bandwidth, both of which can be found in abundance in even a moderatly sized group.
There's obviously a lot more to it, all of which kinda points to the fact that you can't just say "free software == communism, ergo it's bad", there's quite a bit of apples vs. oranges here. But, of course, many of the ideals held by many in the open source community are very much the professed (not necessarily practiced in reality) ideals of communism, not all of it is a bad thing, after all.
Incidently, what makes you say that communism failed? There are still plenty of communist countries in the world.
sic transit gloria mundi
"As a person satisfies a set of needs, starting with the survival needs, she becomes motivated by the subsequent set of needs."
That's my reason. My woman is turned on by what she calls brainy things. So basically, it gets her to satisfy a set of my needs
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Tim
...for the chicks.
There was also a bonus. When starting a job you often have to get a utility library to make life easier. With the open source project under my belt, I could just import it and start using it.
As Mallory might have said.
I was going to reply for real, but I can't now. Just as I'm about to begin typing I see the .NET adverstisment. *sigh*
-- Powered By Linux
While the other 4 replies to this post (as of the time I read it) seem to think that your code is company property, I tend to disagree.
... and it's not like we're volunteers, but here the programs are simply a means to an end rather than an end in and of themselves.
... well, that's a horse of a different color. ;-)
You said: "my boss tells me: We need a program that does foo",
but the repliers here seem to have read "my boss tells me: Write me a program that does foo"
People, there's no reason to tell your boss that you wrote the damn program if you want to release it open-source, so long as you don't release trade secrets or other confidential info in the process. Tell him you downloaded it open-source and modified it to suit your needs.
If he just "needs a program that does foo" he won't care where it came from so long as it works. It's more likely anyway that the boss would instead say "do foo" and leave it to you to determine how this should be handled.
I happen to be lucky enough to work in academia where sharing information and source code is vital to the continuation of our projects
If this is the case in the company you work for, it's likely that your boss also doesn't care if you release something you wrote on-the-job open-source, so long as you aren't revealing any secrets by doing so. Of course, if you're a programmer for a software firm
-=[You cannot consistently judge this statement to be true.]=-
IMHO, both are correct. As an IT Security Admin (audits, policies, click-click GUI FW admin), i get paid well. But the work satisfaction (read self-actualization) is very low. Hence, I contribute to open source.
On the other hand, I have also participated in projects where the commercial products were too expensive.
You conclude open source is based on the principles of communism. Not sure how you come to this conclusion. Most open source authors write the software because *THEY* wanted the software, not because someone else did, specifically. It just so happens that the software might be useful to someone else too, so if the source is openned up, a lot of people can work on it, and the original author gains directly from other contributions as well. Communism? No... it's quite selfish, actually. It just happens to be an interesting upshot of this form of selfishness that a lot of people happen to get something out of it.
It might also be worth adding that real success is measured not by a bottom line on a bank statement, but solely by the measure of satisfaction that one has with oneself. Anyone who says anything other than that is probably trying to get you to do something for him.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Disclaimer: Not a coder, just an observer...
Doesn't the OSS community work as a culture where one's motivation comes, in part, from emulating what others have done? A culture isn't centralized, it doesn't have committees or even goals. In many ways, "it just works"...
There are obvious leading figures and groups, of course. And, surely, some people start coding because they read The Cathedral and the Bazaar or they look up to RMS or Linus. Others are just part of it because it works...
On the other hand, contrary to a "real" society, (almost) nobody's born into it. Come to think of it, we also choose our affiliations IRL, so the difference isn't so great...
Alexandre http://enkerli.wordpress.com/
...in a standup routine. At least for men.
Men have no idea what impresses women. They build bridges, join the army. And write open source software... to get laid.
But why do people write GPLed sh*t?
Why did he post this even though he knew it was OT? My guess is... not even enough social skills to use a related discussion board or mailing list OR too stupid to use GOOGLE
Your experience is limited.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
So i write the program that does foo, and if i decide that it could potentially be useful to someone else except me, i release it as open-source.
Yup, that. When I write something useful for my own purposes, and I think that somebody else might find it useful, I share it. In exchange (in a distant way), other people share things with me. All of our lives are consequently simplified. It's that simple.
-Waldo Jaquith
it beats watching TV.
i don't want to be told what I can and can't do on my computer.
I can answer thsi since I just started contributing code to opne source in my speciality..
:)
..I worte to see more helpfull stuff provided to the independent developer in J2ME gaming so that we can compete against those forces such as Sega, Sony, and etc..
We write Open Source Software to piss off Dave Winer (http://www.scripting.com) !!
Hey we have to have something exciting since we are not paid..:)
But seriously the stuff I am writing for open source
Don't Tread on OpenSource
What about Slackware? Its for people like me who hate Microsoft and love UNIX!
I suspect much of it is written on company time, on the sneak,
I suspect that much more of it is written on company time quite openly, and with the full support of the company. I know that's how I got started, way back in the eighties. A small company, faced with the choice between licensing some expensive proprietary software that more or less did the job, and using some free software that almost did the job, turned to their in-house programmer (me) and said, "how much to add the features we need?" And lo and behold, my time cost a whole lot less.
"Why Do People Write Open Source Software?"
They don't. They write Free Software.
It'll keep showing up until it stops getting bites. More power to him.
It doesn't matter why people do it. The fact of the matter is that they do and they will continue doing it for whatever reason they have. What are the consequences and how is society at whole affected?
More articles by tech geeks trying to devine peoples motives. We need to find some sociology geeks to study this stuff cause they can actually ask the right questions to get the important answers.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
I code free open source software for the fame baby... Yeah...
Oh? I thought it was just morally upright and/or hard working people who thought this way -- wouldn't lazyboneses actually prefer a system of forced equal sharing?
A good point, but isn't that the difference between knowing what you need, and stating what you want? Most procrastinating lazy people know that they should work hard and get rewarded for that, but don't.
In my perfect world I'd do no work and be a trillionairre, but alas.. I know I've got to work instead. 99% of the world is moral. Most people don't believe murder or rape are right, most people believe you should reap what you sow.. but just because we don't all live up to morals doesn't mean we don't have them.
"C'mon babe, I know my slashcode really turns you on, but I can't have sex right now. The kernel team is having a fit over a patch I suggested for QOS issues, I have some project notes to update on Sourceforge, I have a chapter to read in the latest O'Reilly camel book, and I want to recompile the new Doom source. You're going to have to wait."
"Yes, I know Linus Torvalds has children. I don't have as much time as he does."
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
I _originally_ decided to write free software for a very simple
/.". We weren't saddled with the impossible task of reconciling
/. and kerneltrap and 100
reason: in order to join a community based on friendship, mutual
support, and shared intellectual development, dedicated to improving
it's larger environment through hacking (in the sense of "playful,
forthright, responsible, and creative development and application of
technical and engineering skill, insight, and ideas").
In high school, and then later in college, there were all the regular
faces you'd see around the computer labs. There was a culture there,
for a time, now largely gone, based on sharing ideas and resources,
and being friendly. We learned from one another, we egged each other
on to better and better achievements, and we made our campuses better
even for people who were outside of the clique. We'd go out for
Chinese food, order pizzas, and then drop by the basement of the guy
who had a discarded rack-mount pdp-11 in his basement to see if we
could still boot the thing. We'd show off our hacks to one another.
We traded copies of papers and books. We weren't competing in a
scarce job market. We weren't competing for "who gets the best press
on
the supposed "business realities" of our non-hacker bosses with the
essentially mathematical truths that under-pin the craft we were
learning.
Around that time, software was becoming a big, mass-market commercial
product for the first time. There was visicalc and scriptsit, for
example. There were warnings from faculty members that pirating
software was against the rules. And a little while after that, there
were the early writings of and about RMS, and against that: the
example of unipress emacs.
In those writings, hacker cultures were pretty well described. The
fundamental contradiction between such human communities and
proprietary licensing were clearly spelled out. Free software was a
no brainer. It was simply the only civilized alternative.
Resume fodder. Fame. Power of volunteers. A few million bucks to
line the pockets of RHAT execs. A general mean-spiritedness and
intellectual dishonesty when projects compete. A shockingly naive
and dangerous popular outlook on what good programming consists of.
A commoditization of programmers to the point where they are formed
into a worse-than-peasant-class. A stunningly uninformed and
uncritical view of technology dominating
project mailing lists. An FSF whose mission is a jet-setting RMS and
a completely unfunded, bottom of the page, also-ran "build a
GNU-system" task....
The free software "community" these days is decadence. It has become
divorced from human values. It's in a shameful state.
The free software movement originated out of the mourning of a single
individual for a lost community. How ironic that it has evolved into
a culture that actively resists the formation of community.
-t
Bardencj started the chick thread, I just riffed on his very funny lead and forgot to remove my karma bonus when I posted.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
bash :)
seSales, Point of Sale software for OS X.
"Here is the core argument: There are a thousand Open Source projects that get started out of need or fun, are maintained for awhile for fame, then get abandoned because there is no reason to go on. Eventually, the programmers come to understand that "users" are people who yell at you to fix stuff. So Open Source is inherently flawed. It only works because otherwise unknown programmers can get 15 minutes of fame using the Internet as low-barrier entry into introducing their skill to the world. Since they are introverted nobodies, getting a few emails from unknown users that say "good job!" feels great. But in time, most Open Source projects grind to a halt. The ones that survive are projects like Linux and Apache that have substantial involvement by PAID engineers. One could argue, in fact, that the idea of Open Source software being created by volunteers is a misnomer. Even Linus Torvalds is paid by Transmeta to be the God of Linux."
From Cringely's latest article
My name is Carlos Montoya. You share files of my music. Prepare to die.
For the same reason cavemen painted on caves. Certain artists/creators have a desire to share their work with the world, to express themselves through their medeium. This idea is not peculiar; this idea is human. It's where the term humanitarian comes from.
I myself make the source code for my software freely available for the purpose of scientific dissemination. I work in a field (computer vision) where complex software is developed and forms the basis of experiments. Publishing papers which describe the algorithm and results is the main output but this has some limitations. Often there isnt the space to describe all the subtle aspects which make the program work. Perhaps the author does not even appreciate themselves what it is which is really driving the process (code can chge an aweful lot from conception to use). Also we want others to build on our work and that process is made much more difficult when everyone has to re-implement algorithms from scratch, possibly from incomplete or inaccurate papers.
Sharing code to explain techniques is something that has happened in experimental science for many years. Mordern open source frameworks such as GNU have made this task much easier by providing tools and standards. The web has also massively improved distribution.
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
IMO, Free Software is a socialist approach. Free Software essentially says "software code should be available to the entire community to". It's a communal property system.
However, it isn't comparable to Communism. Communism is an economic system featuring centralised control of limited communal resources. Free Software is fundamentally different, as it deals with a resource (code) that can be duplicated and distributed at near-zero cost, and is not centrally controlled.
A lot of OSS is superior because the writer knows it will be perused by his peers and betters. There's no way he wants to look bad in front of them.
Also - think how good it would be to be able say on your resume - 'contributed source code to the current version of LINUX.'
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
For an in-depth economic treatment of the open source phenomenon I would refer you to this very interesting article "Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm" by Yochai Benkler, a professor of Law, New York University School of Law.
In a nutshell Professor Benkler argues that this mode of production, i.e. OSS, is in fact more economical than the contract-based models (You write code: I pay you) in use in the corporate world today.
It is a bit dense in places but well worth the read.
PaulW, IT Consultant
the live with their mothers and don't have anything better to do. Not that there is anything better.
Such a tool already exists and works quite well. Try phpCodeBeautifer. Thanks to this useful and free software (although not open source), you can spend more time on PHP development rather than on formatting the source code :)
Too much people writing things that were analysed over and over by many people, specialy Eric S. Raymond in his papers, specially "A Brief History of Hackerdom", "Cathedral and the Bazaar", "Homesteading the Noosphere", "The Magic Cauldron", and last but not the least "The Revenge of the Hackers". Even for those who already read the mentioned texts in the begining of 90s, they deserve to be read again since they have been updated by ESR.
Zandao.
I write OSS for all sorts of reasons, depending on what the project is. It's not so hard or so much effort that I need to review my priorities before starting.
GPL Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator plugins including a growing menagerie of file formats;
sample lex/yacc infix algebraic expression parser;
PDP-8 assembler;
other stuff.
So far no dates but I remain optimistic.
you had me at #!
Canisius High School