Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!rutgers!rochester!cornell!batcomputer!sun!nelson
From: nelson@sun.soe.clarkson.edu (Russ Nelson)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Posting shareware to the Usenet
Message-ID: <202@sun.soe.clarkson.edu>
Date: 29 Dec 87 18:44:10 GMT
References: <417@ddsw1.UUCP> <262@papaya.bbn.com> <4309@bellcore.bellcore.com> <233@academ.UUCP> <3669@hoptoad.uucp> <470@gethen.UUCP> <2377@dasys1.UUCP>
Reply-To: nelson@sun.soe.clarkson.edu.UUCP (Russ Nelson)
Organization: Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY
Lines: 13

In article <2377@dasys1.UUCP> samperi@dasys1.UUCP (Dominick Samperi) writes:
>Question: What motivates a programmer to develop a large complex software
>system, perhaps requiring many weeks (or even years) of development effort,
>which is then posted for the world to use, for free?

I wrote Freemacs (the only freely copyable programmable editor for the IBM
PC and clones) because FSF's GNU emacs is too big to run on PCs.  I
did it for my own use, but I would rather see large numbers of people
gain from my effort, so I distribute it for free.  Because of the nature
of the program, mostly techies are attracted to it, so I don't get many
calls of the form "Which way do I put the floppy into the drive?" questions.

My reward is the satisfaction of a job well done.
-russ