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Open Sources 2.0
book

Open Sources 2.0

by Chris DiBona, Mark Stone, Danese Cooper
October 2005
Intermediate to advanced
488 pages
17h 4m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Open Sources 2.0

Chapter 9. Open Source and the Small Entrepreneur

Russ Nelson

I’ve been giving away my software since 1983, full time since 1991. I don’t do it for fun, although I enjoy it. I do it because it’s a way for a small business to earn money and it’s fun. Each of my software interests started as a hobby, and some have turned into a profession. Not every hobby of mine has turned professional, and I hope to explain why some have and some have not.

Three of my hobby projects, which I’ll talk about in depth after I introduce myself, have turned profitable. They are Freemacs, Packet Drivers, and qmail.[1] Freemacs is an MS-DOS text editor, styled after Emacs. It’s still used today as the official editor of the FreeDOS project. Packet Drivers hide the difference between Ethernet cards in an MS-DOS system. If you’ve ever eaten at a McDonald’s restaurant, your order was communicated through Crynwr Packet Drivers. Qmail is a mail transfer agent (MTA) for sending and receiving Internet mail. Qmail is the engine behind Rediffmail’s 30-million-user, multiterabyte, 100-node email cluster, and many smaller sites.

Introduction

I did hardware hacking long before college. Digital electronics was too expensive for me: $1 per TTL quad nand gate at a time when vinyl records cost only $5. So, I fiddled around with analog electronics. I invented a trigger sweep for my dual-beam oscilloscope, and an analog computer throttle for my model railroad.

My high school was a member of LIRICS: Long Island Regional ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596008023Errata Page