Day 5: Evolution
By day I’m a developer at Mediaphormedia and for the last month or so most of my nights have consisted on working at night to keep caught up with support. My tour of duty is about a month away from ending though and I can go back to writing fun code again. Lately, I’ve felt like I don’t have enough time to work on fun applications at work and I used to use a night or two a week to balance that out with projects that I like to work on.
Tonight, I started two new projects or rather brainstormed with a friend of mine from Miami a name for a new project and a name for an older project. I have hundreds of projects that I’ve worked on but none of them have seemed useful enough to release for anyone else to work on.
Many years ago I wrote a program that back in the 90’s had just over 50k people downloaded over the course of a month. At the time, this was a huge accomplishment for me and I released the source code a few times for people to learn from. Over the course of a few years, I had over 250k people download my little application. The thought of polishing it up and selling the application for $5 or $10 did cross my mind but I made the decision to release as freeware and then put the code out in the public domain. At the time even charging $1 a copy would have more then paid for my college, paid off my car, and living expenses for quite a few years.
The application that I wrote was based on another public domain application whose source code I scoured and learned from. Even though I was not under any pressure to release the code it felt like the right decision. I learned so much from that original application that it allowed me to rewrite my application and add some new functionality to it. It was my choice to release the source code so that other people could learn from it.
Last year, I discovered that someone ported my application to Java from my old C++ code and added quite a few new features to it. I’m flattered that an application that I wrote back in 1996 or 1997 is still around and people have learned from it and are able to freely download a modern version of it which includes the rewritten source code.
Lately I’ve heard too many people arguing about which license to release their source code in and there has been a lot of talk about freedom. I’m not going to argue which side is right or wrong but instead state what freedom is to me. Freedom is releasing source code in a license that does not put restrictions on how people learn from, use, or view my code. I’d rather people learn from the source code that I wrote then fear reading it because of the license that I released it under.
