"Although I have been a professional programmer for many years, I have only recently
begun to develop Open Source applications (nothing worth releasing yet, so don't bother
looking ;)). Part of what drew me to Linux (and the GTK+ toolkit I chose to use) was the
concept of "freedom" as embodied by the GNU Public License (GPL)."
"It seemed only fair: I was building on top of the hard work of many programmers, and it
would have been wrong of me to obscure their efforts by producing a proprietary piece of
code. After all, my efforts would at best constitute 20% of the ultimate codebase (and that
doesn't even include the toolchain itself, which is GPL'd). My program rests upon the Gnu
libc, various other libraries (like readline, glib/gtk, and others), and X Windows. Millions
of lines of code, freely contributed, maintained, and distributed."
"I *could* have produced a proprietary, binary-only release. I could have taken the hard
work of those faceless programmers and made it serve my own ends. I could have let
greed overcome my sense of fair play. But I chose not to: to do so would have been to
admit that my conscience had been totally burned away."
