Open Source capitalists

[Lawrence]

from: "ravi" <gadfly at home.com>
> but in my memory, most open source software (and
> here i am not differentiating between FSF software and the newer open
> source efforts) ranging from GNU's sophisticated compilers to larry
> wall's perl were written by either professionals in the industry or it
> was written more out of interest, than motivated by the possibility of
> employment as a result. take eric allman who wrote the complex sendmail
> program that still manages many email gateways on the internet - i
> believe he has since founded or joined a company that sells this
> software as a product, but i doubt he had such employment considerations
> in mind when he wrote the original code. larry wall, to give another
> example, was employed (at one of the baby bells if i remember) when he
> first released perl

In 1999 Italy emerged onto the Linux scene in a big way. Suddenly, for some
reason, a lot of code was coming out of Italy. I asked Ted Goranson, a
researcher who was then working on a research grant from DARPA, why he
thought that was. His answer was underemployment. He felt Italy wasted the
talents of its programmers, and those programmers were pouring their energy
into open source projects because it gave them a productive outlet.