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.

[1] Qmail is an all-lowercase name, and will be capitalized here only at the beginning of a sentence.



Open Sources 2.0
Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution
ISBN: 0596008023
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 217

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