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 ...