[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“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.“