Bernard Hill writes: | | ... none of that tells me why anyone creates software in the first | place. I do not start projects which are not going to bring money in. I | see clearly that as an end-user having the source code is beneficial - | but what's in it for the programmer who created it?
Fame? Of course, it could be just accidental. Consider my tune finder. I wrote it originally for very selfish reasons. I'd noticed that there were a lot of collections of tunes in abc format appearing on the web. But when I wanted to find a tune, I had to dig through all of them. And they were all laid out differently. But I'm a programmer. So I naturally thought "This is a job for a computer, not a human." I happened to be somewhat familiar with the web, and knew perl pretty well. So I decided to write myself a little web search program. "How hard can it be?" It was a bit harder than I thought, but not much. Pretty soon I had some html files full of indexes and titles of the tunes and the URLs where I could find them. Then, being an especially lazy programmer, I wrote a little web page that let me enter a pattern to match, and a cgi script to run through the index file and show me the matches. Then I made the mistake of mentioning it to a few friends. There's no way that I can think of to make money from this yet. Yeah, google.com is profitable, but how can you get musicians to pay to look up things like this? Anyway, my web site is on a departmental machine at MIT. They are happy to see people developing interesting and innovative things on their machines, but they have a pretty strict rule that anything that makes money has gotta go. Not that they disapprove of making money; they just can't have it happening on the departmental machines. So the obvious thing is to GPL it all. In fact, all my code is sitting there in directories that you can read, so if you like, you can grab a copy and run your own tune search. So far, I don't know of anyone who has done this. I'm not surprised; it would be a learning experience. If someone does, I hope they honor the GPL and share any improvements with me and the rest of the world. It has got me a bit of notoriety. But mostly, it has given me a fairly convenient way of finding tunes any time I'm near a machine with web access, which is getting to be more and more of the world as time passes. If it helps other people too, well, as long as it's a small load on the machine (and it's a tiny load so far), they're welcome. The department likes the publicity, my name gets known among a select crowd (that's you folks). And I can use it whenever I like from anywhere. Does this need any more explaining? To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
