底下是從 http://archive.org 撈回來的資料,現在該頁已經沒內容了。(話說 gcin 0.1.0 tarball 也是從 archive.org 撈回來的)
http://web.archive.org/web/20000303115338/www.linux-mag.com/1999-11/joy_01.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20000303140524/www.linux-mag.com/1999-11/joy_02.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20000302085516/www.linux-mag.com/1999-11/joy_03.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20000303182148/www.linux-mag.com/1999-11/joy_04.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20000414193525/www.linux-mag.com/1999-11/joy_05.html
關於 vi 發展背景是 joy_04.html 那一頁。
以下轉貼全文:
FEATURES
The Joy of Unix
Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy charts where Linux and free software fit into his company's solar system.
by Eugene Eric Kim
As one of the creators of Berkeley Unix, Bill Joy
knows a thing or two about developing and marketing a free operating
system. Sun Microsystems' chief scientist has survived the Unix wars
and has watched both his company and its chief competitor, Microsoft,
grow from tiny start-ups to industry giants. Though he has had a major
hand in the development of such important Unix technologies as NFS
(Sun's Network File System), the Berkeley Unix TCP/IP stack, and the vi
text editor, Joy's current obsession is trying to build a thriving
development community around Sun's Jini distributed computing
technology and its not-quite-Open Source software licensing model. Joy
recently accepted Linux Magazine's invitation to dinner, where
he gave Publisher Adam Goodman, Executive Editor Robert McMillan, and
Associate Editor Eugene Kim the lowdown on what Sun thinks of Linux and
Open Source.
Linux Magazine: One of the reasons we wanted to
talk to you was that you have a long history with and a broad
perspective on Unix and free software. What do you think of Linux? A
lot of people talk about it as more than just an operating system.
Bill
Joy: It's actually less. It's just a kernel if you want to be technical
about it. It's politically incorrect to conflate Linux with the
applications. At least one person will get upset. So to be quite
precise, it's just the kernel of the OS. When we did Berkeley Unix, we
were doing the operating system and all of the applications.
In
a lot of ways, the Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) was on the road
to being free with source available and many of the things that Linux
is. But it got hung up in this legal fight between the University of
California and Unix Systems Labs.
Those are the accidents of
history. Now with Linux, we have this new version of Unix written with
similar kinds of values that BSD had. One of the great strengths of
Unix is that it's been rewritten and reimplemented several times.
Applications with similar names and similar functions are widely
understood, which allows this healthy kind of invention and reinvention
to occur.
LM: So if it weren't for the lawyers, we'd be called FreeBSD Magazine?
BJ:
If BSD had been free, there would have been no reason to rewrite it.
The new thing that happened with Linux was cultural. The Internet is
now coupling people together in ways that probably couldn't have
happened before. How else would the developers have found each other?
I
did my work in the era of the magnetic tape. We sent Unix in source
form to thousands of people; they sent us a few hundred dollars,
because I had to pay for the postage and for the printing of the
manuals, and that was our network. It was a postal-age speed thing. It
was not very convenient.
LM:Were licensing issues as important back then as they seem to be now?
BJ:
No. I knew I needed a license for BSD because at some point Berkeley
was going to discover it. So I just took a license from the University
of Toronto and modified it a little bit and started using that. I
figured if I sent people a tape, and there was nothing for them to
sign, they wouldn't take it seriously.
When you give things
away for free, often people think that's what it's worth: Nothing. So
charging them a small amount and giving them a license to sign actually
created a perception of value. I'm not saying the tape didn't have
value, but an awful lot of stuff comes across your desk that you just
throw away.
LM: So, what did your license actually say?
BJ:
I don't remember. It was a one-page thing. I didn't have any lawyers
look at it and I'm not a lawyer. I just made it up as I went along.
What
happened was that at some point we were getting to be big enough that
we were sending out hundreds of these [Unix tapes] a year and charging
hundreds of dollars for them. A quarter of a million dollars in revenue
is a great deal of money for a graduate student. Scott McNealy likes to
say: "To ask permission is to seek denial." And we were operating with
that philosophy.
But there were huge amounts of money
involved and we were becoming pretty visible. So eventually we decided
to send AT&T a letter asking them: "Is this okay what we're doing?"
And 18 months later they sent a letter back: "We take no position." We
won't answer your question. So that's what it was like to deal with a
regulated monopoly of lawyers. That same sort of legal structure is
what caused [AT&T] to license the transistor for nothing.
So
we couldn't actually get an answer from them and it was only years
later that this whole fracas erupted around who owns the code. It
turned out their code was as tainted with Berkeley stuff as ours was
with theirs, so they eventually came to a truce. That's what I've heard
second hand or just drinking wine with people. So there's a very
tortured and funny history to all this code.
LM: Have you
ever contemplated what it would have been like if you'd released your
code under the GNU Public License (GPL) or something similar?
BJ:
I don't see what the advantage to it is. The important thing is that
people have the source code. I actually think it's fine that people can
take BSD and make improvements to it and reap software profit.
I
don't think, given where we were and what we were trying to do, that
the license made that much of a difference. At Berkeley, we had the
model that software is the result of your research. The university
tradition is that when you do research, you publish. So not giving
people the source code for software meant that you weren't publishing
your research. A fundamental model of BSD was: Software is a result of
our research. We'll publish it and other people will use it if they
choose. If someone commercializes it, I don't particularly care,
because if you publish research in a university, people can
commercialize it. That's just the way it is.
The important
thing in my mind is that people share stuff. We've done something at
Sun -- Community Source Licensing -- which is another spin on this. But
the fundamental principle in my mind is that people get to see the
results of other people's work in a way that they can stand on
shoulders rather than on toes. The details can vary; there can be many
approaches and they work in different contexts.
I think the
GPL is fine. I just don't necessarily agree that it will achieve
everything that Richard Stallman thinks it will. I'm not as religious
about this as other people are.
LM: Just what was your involvement with Sun's Community Source License?
BJ: I was the instigator of it.
LM: Did you at any point evaluate the GPL for Sun's projects?
BJ:
I can't license all of Sun's intellectual property under the GPL,
because it just won't work. I don't see any reason why I should give
somebody who's doing commercial reuse unfettered access to stuff that
cost me millions of dollars to do. We're spending over a billion
dollars a year in research. I can't just throw it all on the street.
Not only because it's worth something, but because I'm not convinced
people will respect its values -- the values I would want to see
expressed in the way people used it.
If I make code available
under the GPL, I'll lose control of it. The Europeans have this notion
of artistic rights, and it seems to me an artist -- the person who
creates something -- has some right over the ultimate use of what they
do. Artists' rights also allow an artist to get paid on resale of their
stuff later. My view is that programmers are like artists. I think
there's got to be some economic reward back to the people who do the
creative work that turns out to matter.
The GPL just doesn't
solve my business problem at Sun. I would like all of our intellectual
property to be available in source form, but I can't economically do
that under the GPL.
In the object-oriented world [of
programming], binaries are almost as usable as source because they have
clean interfaces and boundaries. This whole thing about open source
makes much less sense once you start talking about [object-oriented
programming languages like] Java, except to the extent that people
don't get the boundaries right.
LM: What about your original
implementation of TCP/IP for BSD, which was freely available and which
became the basis for a lot of the other implementations that are out
there? It seems that from a compatibility standpoint, Java, for
example, would have benefited from freely available source code in the
same way TCP/IP did.
BJ: The top predator now is Microsoft.
We didn't have a top predator back when I did TCP/IP. When you have a
person with unlimited funds who is clearly focused on destroying the
value proposition of what you're doing, you'd be a fool not to account
for them in the strategy that you adopted.
LM: Do you feel that Microsoft might actually try to create Microsoft Linux in an attempt to fragment the Linux community?
BJ:
The enemy in terms of fragmentation is usually yourself -- the people
who know the most about making the software better. It's likely to be
two separate groups that both decide that they're right and they're
both going to make it better and just diverge. You've seen the history
of the family tree of Unix. It's all over the map. It's certain to
happen to the Linux tree at some point.
LM: Then why hasn't it happened already?
BJ:
It has. Depending on what we'd say Linux is -- the kernel hasn't
fragmented, but the distributions have. People's systems aren't the
same.
LM: Do you think that the GPL discourages incompatibility by requiring people to make their source code freely available?
BJ:
I don't see that it really prevents incompatibility. The only thing I
know that prevents incompatibility is requiring people to be
compatible. The GPL permits compatibility. It does not encourage it.
LM: Can you explain Sun's position toward Linux on Sparc? Sun seems to be supporting the development effort somewhat.
BJ:
Right. Well, the customer's always right. If the customer wants Linux,
that's great -- then we should give it to them. Sparc is the hardware
that we make, and we're supportive of and very glad that people in the
Linux community have done the hard work that they need to do.
We
treat each of our divisions as entirely separate businesses, and I
don't necessarily know what's going to be important in the long run.
People have now figured out that companies that are a little more
chaotic in this way actually are better adapters to environmental
changes, and I think it's one of the reasons Sun has done so well. We
don't try to get everybody signed up to one credo. We do not have one
ironclad set of rules. We allow this kind of diversity internally.
LM: Sun is providing machines for Linux developers. What else is it doing to support Linux?
BJ:
I don't actually know. I'm more involved in Java and Jini. The
company's very large -- we have like 30,000 people -- and I probably
get involved with about half of the R&D. The Solaris stuff I have
the least to do with.
Sun wins if somebody has a Linux machine
with Java because that improves the Java community. Sun wins if it's a
Sparc. That's even better. To be honest, if it was Solaris, Sparc, and
Java, that would be even better. But we're not infinitely greedy here.
The
old Macy's model was if they didn't have what you wanted, they'd send
you to the store that did, even if it was a competitor. If you come to
us, we don't expect that we're going to solve all of your problems. You
may want Apache on Linux on x86, and we'll do the best to operate in
that environment because there may be some reason that's beyond our
ability to affect that that's the right answer for you.
So to
be customer-driven is to accept that and to contribute what you can. We
just did this big deal with Apache to put more Java stuff in Apache. So
we're coming at it from all directions.
LM: You're referring to the Jakarta project, where
Sun agreed to donate its JavaServer Pages (JSP) and other Java Web
server-related source code to the Apache project and have it released
under the Apache license.
BJ: That was a local business decision; I'm glad that they did that.
LM: But you still have the same concerns about standardization, compatibility, and so forth?
BJ:
Which I think the Apache community should have also. To the extent that
Apache is a platform, and you want to have it be a healthy platform,
you want the platform to be stable. But, I'm not opposed to limited
cases depending on other licensing mechanisms.
I would always
rather have a legal thing to fall back on to enforce compatibility.
Think of contractual enforcement as sort of the right-wing approach,
and community licensing as more left-wing. We've taken a step to the
center. We expect in most cases the community to enforce compatibility,
but in the limited case of a rogue, I want the ability to enforce a
legal contract, because I don't see any reason why I shouldn't have
that ability. In the left wing, amongst ourselves, we can argue about
these things, but in reality, most of the commercial guys are so far to
the right that we already seem radical by being in the middle.
It's
innovation and sharing versus centralized control. It's basically the
Romans versus the Greeks. That's what it comes down to. Microsoft is
the Roman model, and the other people are basically the Greek model.
That's the real root of it.
LM: Isn't that the same situation with Java? With Jini?
BJ:
No. Because the Java source code has always been widely available.
That's never been the issue. You can download it yourself. Even under
the old license, we basically had a clickable license to download all
this stuff.
Basically, we think that it's much better to work
together than to not work together. That's not a very complicated
value. Microsoft thinks: "anything you do, you compete with us." I
think that if you don't necessarily like what we do, we'll find some
other way to work together. There are not enough of us IT professionals
anyway.
LM: Speaking of Microsoft, have you ever meet Bill Gates?
BJ: Oh yeah. Mostly in the eighties. I met him in the early 1980s.
LM: So would you consider him someone you know fairly well personally?
BJ: No. That would be a stale evaluation of him.
LM: So you believe he's changed?
BJ: I believe it's possible that he has so I can't speak to his current state.
I haven't seen him since -- the last time I talked to him was probably five years ago.
LM: Is Linux the major force pushing against Microsoft?
BJ:
I think Java is probably the major force pushing against Microsoft
right now. I think Linux is a threat but Java's a bigger threat.
LM: Do you see Linux as a threat to Sun at all?
BJ:
No. More Unix is better. Anything that isn't Microsoft is better.
Anybody who buys a Linux machine has a lot better chance of buying a
Solaris machine as their next machine or buying a Sparc machine running
Linux or buying Java. The probabilities are greater for all those cases.
If
I look at the graph of what percentage of customer dollars I'm likely
to get next, it's much higher if they start with Linux than if they
start with Windows. So in all cases, I'd rather win and get
Sparc/Solaris/Java as the solution. But Linux/Sparc/Java would be my
second choice.
LM: Do you know of a company named VA Linux Systems?
BJ: I met somebody who said they were working for them. I don't track the Linux community, though.
LM: What do you think about the business models being built around Linux?
BJ:
I understand that people think they're going to build a business on the
service model, but the truth is customers don't want to pay for that,
so I don't get it. I don't know how it's going to work. People don't
like to pay for service.
The whole proposition with Linux is
that nobody can control the operating system. Some invisible hand
controls it; a community controls it. Any individual company can't
affect where it goes. How is everybody going to use this in a sense?
The Linux companies are hobbled by it because if you say they can add
value, then I say it's going to fragment Linux.
If you accept
the proposition that they can't fragment it, then you also are saying
that they can't really differentiate themselves. Because other than
tuning it up a little bit, to differentiate would cause fragmentation.
I
would argue that for most people the performance is going to be more
than they're going to need anyway. I'm not sure performance
differentiation is going to be that significant. So I'm not exactly
sure how these companies will differentiate themselves technically.
LM: Have you ever considered making the Solaris source code more freely accessible?
BJ:
Yeah. The difficulty is that it's got a lot of third-party stuff that's
licensed under funny terms. So I think it will be really healthy for
both the Solaris and Linux communities to work more closely together.
LM: Think that will ever happen?
BJ:
It already is. We run a lot of Linux binaries, and we're trying to find
ways to work together. Merging isn't a goal. I think Linux and Solaris
have different goals. Linux is not worried about providing MVS class or
VM370 or whatever IBM-class services for corporate data centers. That's
not the center of the Linux community.
LM: But there are certainly areas of overlap.
BJ:
That's okay. It gives people a choice, and that's not a bad thing,
right? I still prefer to win. I'm not saying we're not competitive, but
I'd still rather have it be Linux than NT. If there's two Unix choices
and one Microsoft, that improves our chances.
LM: Do you think it's likely that parts of the Solaris operating system will be individually released as open source software?
BJ:
I think that would be a good thing. There are logistic issues. You have
to spend money to do that and it's hard work. In return, you get the
value that the source code's available so the customer can become more
self-reliant. I think self-reliance is a good thing.
LM: Were you in favor of Sun's decision to move to AT&T Unix with Solaris?
BJ:
It was hard to do a deal with AT&T and it was hard to work with
them. It was a very close call and I went into Scott's office and I
said to him: This is a really close call and I can make the deal happen
if you want. There are pluses and minuses. Personally I think it's a
plus because I think a unified Unix community is better than one that's
not, and I'm concerned about this. But I also think it would be okay if
we decide to go our own way. It's your call. It's a CEO call.
LM:
Do you see similarities between the development community and the
cultural community that's surrounding Linux right now and the community
that surrounded BSD when you were developing it?
BJ: No. Our
community was so small. It was Robert Elz and the people at Berkeley
and the people at Bell Labs. There was one guy in Austria and one in
Australia. No one else contributed much of substance that I recall.
LM: Do you believe that the BSD guys in general have a different philosophy toward software development then the Linux guys do?
BJ:
No. I think that if you exclude device drivers, you'd find that there's
a bit of a myth operating here; that a whole lot of people wrote the
system. It was actually a small number of people.
LM: In BSD or in Linux?
BJ:
Both cases. We have this myth that distributed development works, but
it's a slight bit of a lie in that a small number of bright people can
create an operating system. It does take a lot of people to write all
of the device drivers. That's true. But that doesn't necessarily mean
we can coordinate the programming of hundreds of people writing C code.
I don't know if that's true or not, and I personally don't think Linux
proves it. I don't think Apache proves that. That's the myth that
people have propagated. Maybe it's true, but if you called me as an
expert witness, I would testify that it has not been true in my
experience.
LM: Is there something to the notion that the people working on BSD are more exclusive than the Linux community?
BJ:
That's an us-versus-them thing.These things just get amplified. I don't
think these people vary from each other by much. They just identify
with some group, and that's a human-nature thing.
BSD is
older. It doesn't need as much hacking. So if you're a new person
learning how to hack, BSD was not as good a place to go. It didn't need
as much work. Linux grew up with the Internet. By the time the Net came
along, BSD didn't need the same level of work and wasn't as amenable to
getting people interested in it.
When you already have several
million lines of code, it's not as much fun to work on. Linux was a
great thing because it allowed a lot of people to get involved in
learning about operating systems by helping to finish this system. That
process of creating something is the process of creating a community.
So
Linux came along at the great, perfect time in a perfect, incomplete
state for lots of people to participate in. It was still small enough
that people could read the code. On the other hand, BSD was already
mature, and the things that needed to be done to it were hard enough
that it made it difficult for any person to come and participate.
So
BSD wasn't as amenable to parallel innovation because the bar to
participating was pretty high and the code base was too large. When I
started on Unix, the source code could be listed in ten or twenty
thousand lines as a 50-page or 100-page book.
If I came in
today and wanted to do something with Solaris, I'd be overwhelmed. I
can't have the kind of impact I had on Unix with Solaris. The
second-generation people coming into the Linux community are going to
have the same problem.
LM:: What inspired you to write vi?
BJ:
What happened is that Ken Thompson came to Berkeley and brought this
broken Pascal system, and we got this summer job to fix it. While we
were fixing it, we got frustrated with the editor we were using which
was named ed. ed is certainly frustrating.
We got this code from a guy named George Coulouris at University College in London called em -- Editor for Mortals -- since only immortals could use ed
to do anything. By the way, before that summer, we could only type in
uppercase. That summer we got lowercase ROMs for our terminals. It was
really exciting to finally use lowercase.
LM: What year was that?
BJ: '76 or '77. It was the summer Carter was president. So we modified em and created en. I don't know if there was an eo or an ep but finally there was ex. [laughter] I remember en but I don't know how it got to ex.
So I had a terminal at home and a 300 baud modem so the cursor could
move around and I just stayed up all night for a few months and wrote vi.
LM: So you didn't really write vi in one weekend like everybody says?
BJ:
No. It took a long time. It was really hard to do because you've got to
remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem.
That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just
barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely
fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty
slow.
9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way
slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel
productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that
computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands
this anymore.
The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at
MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in
contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge
machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens.
So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I'm
sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with
a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.
It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi
was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore -- unless you decide
to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud,
in which case you'll realize that the Net is not usable at 2400 baud.
It used to be perfectly usable at 1200 baud. But these days you can't
use the Web at 2400 baud because the ads are 24 kilobytes.
LM: Do you still use vi?
BJ: No, because I mostly use Netscape.
LM: To write code?
BJ: I mostly do e-mail. The last code I wrote of any substance, I wrote in vi.
LM:
Did you have a sense back in those days -- even in the furthest region
of your mind -- that you were working on something that would
eventually build an industry or change the world?
BJ:No.
LM: At what point did it occur to you? At what point did you look around and say: Whoa?
BJ: I probably constantly under-estimated it.
LM: You must have realized that it was happening at some point in your career.
BJ: I think the Web was a "wow" for me because my dad was using it. [laughter]
LM: You said earlier that Sun would like to work more
with the Linux community. Do you have any thoughts on how something
like that might happen?
BJ: We have Linux mode on Solaris and
there's Solaris mode on Linux. We've done analysis on both sets of APIs
and what commonality they have. If the Linux community believes it's
okay for there to be other choices, then that's kind of a prerequisite
to working with somebody who's different. It's okay that there's
another version of Unix out there and total world domination is not our
goal.
LM: Are there opportunities to do things with Linux
that Sun was never able to do as a company? For example, Unix never got
the desktop. Or at least, Sun was never really able to bring Unix to
the desktop.
BJ: That was our whole business for years.
LM:
Right, but Microsoft owns the desktop right now. It's not meant as a
cut against Sun. It's just a fact that Unix is basically a server
operating system.
BJ: We haven't given up. We're doing Java clients now.
LM: Why do you think that Unix was never successful on the desktop?
BJ:
Because Microsoft had a person who was very greedy and who was very
brutal in his business dealings and was handed a monopoly by IBM due to
ineptness. They had several opportunities to rein this guy in and the
management blew it. So the IBM monopoly got transferred basically due
to blunders. Microsoft is a direct successor to the IBM mainframe
monopoly. The corporate guys coalesced around the PC standard because
it came from IBM. Not because it was any good.
LM: But does
something like Linux offer Sun an opportunity to rectify past mistakes?
For example, there are windowing systems being developed for Linux that
need ...
BJ: We've had windowing systems, several of them,
for many years. The presence or absence of a windowing system didn't
win or lose the war. We have had CDE and Open Windows and X-Windows and
NeWS.
We've had applications too. We've had all of these
things. I suggest that the desktop war was not won based on technical
merit, but on business decisions. Microsoft came along and took over
the apps base with Office. Office locked people in to the point where
corporation don't feel they can change their desktops, not because
they're locked to Windows but to Microsoft Office.
Now what's
happening is the wind is blowing hard for the companies to put
everything on the Net. Make the browser the access point for the
desktops. So the desktop is really becoming a browser. But the people
-- the companies -- still have these Microsoft Office hairballs that
nobody likes. Have you seen a good review of Office 2000? Everybody
hates it. But Office is what locks up the desktop.
LM: There is a lot of talk about Linux possibly conquering the desktop.
BJ:
It's easier to talk about than to do. The Macintosh is easy to use, and
it even has Office. What's the difference between Linux and a
Macintosh? If Linux with future apps is going to be good enough, why
aren't more people buying Macs?
LM: You think this is a fight that's already been fought, basically?
BJ:
No, I'm not saying you can't find a way to win. It's just that I
haven't heard what it is. Given a sufficient number of people who care
and an ability to be flexible about the way you achieve your objective,
Linux might get there. You have to find a way around some of these
things that are preventing people from switching.
These guys
at Microsoft are very aggressive business people, and they have been
very successful as aggressive business people. I don't think they've
been very successful at building good products. I think history will
judge their products to be the lowest-quality consumer products ever
built and manufactured in any scale.
It's similar to how
Detroit got itself to where they manufactured incredibly low-quality
cars, which coincided in history with GM's maximum market share. What
happens is monopolists don't tend to value product quality. Very high
market share is what they value.
As GM's market share was
declining, it always talked about getting back market share. Why didn't
they talk about making products that people wanted to buy that were
high quality? That was the problem. I heard Steve Ballmer [President of
Microsoft]say this in a speech: "Our number one goal is maximizing our
market share." Excuse me. Market share should be a consequence of your
goal. That can't be the goal.
The goal is to build great
products. I have an infinite respect for Steve Jobs because whatever
else you say about him, his passion is to build a great product. Good
things come from that. Bad things come from a focus on market share. So
the Linux community should have as its goal to build the greatest
operating system. Its goal should not be, "Beat Microsoft." Because
that's a market-share goal. That's a very, very destructive,
counterproductive goal.
LM: Do you think there are any other goals the Linux community should pursue?
BJ:
Make it the best product it can be. Figure out who you want it to be
for and build it to serve that community -- if it's for yourself,
that's okay. Make it the best hobbyist -- in the best sense of the word
-- operating system. Linux to me is like amateur radio was to radio.
Amateur radio developed all the radio technology. Linux is developing
some good technology, and these people are hobbyists. Probably some
Latin root of the word "hobbyist" means people who love something and
care about it. So it's a sense of love and caring for reasons that are
noneconomic.
It's like amateur astronomers. In essence, it's
amateur in the highest sense of the word, having the highest affinity
to caring that it's always the best. And tinkering and all this kind of
stuff, that's a very positive value.
Eugene Eric Kim writes, programs, and consults on a freelance basis. He is the author of CGI Developer's Guide(Sams.net 1996), and is currently writing a book on the history of free software. He can be reached at eekim@eekim.com.