I found a couple cool software packages in the last few days. They are:
Progect
Progect is a freeware Palm app which does what I was going to do myself: make lists of lists. It's got a "task list" sort of metaphor which is easy to hink of. You make a list of itemts, and then sub-items under those. Each item has a progress meter icon, and you can specify "progress" in various ways: percent complete, number of things done, or no completeness (just "an item to do"). It's a very nice app. (BTW, an incredibly nice gent by the name of Bryan White turned me on to this. Much thanks, Bryan!)
Linksysmon
To get information fro a Linksys router I have, I've been using a smallish C app that I hacked together. It essentially syslogs SNMP traps and it's very basic and not altogether useful for much. Linksysmon does that, but does it way better. You get router stats and much better logs. As a bonus, it will send email alerts when certain defined things happen, and comes with a script which sends a newly-changed IP address to dynamic DNS service. It's Perl-based too, so very easy to install and work on.
Dailystrips
This one is just amazingly cool. It's a Perl script that will go out and fetch various comics. The really swift bit is that it can save them all locally without you having to resort to piping trickery. I set it up to grab a bunch of my favorite strips and put them on my intranet's home page. It runs every morning, and links back to the old strips (in case I miss a day).
No matter how hard I tried,
I could find no reason for people to create software and then give it out for free.
It costs hell of time to develop something, why not sell it?
There must be some reason.
Brian
A lot of people like to give back, Brian. They might use free/open source software in their everyday lives (about 95% of what I do for a living involves such software) and feel a need to contribute to the general well-being of the world. They do it for the same reason someone stops to help another change a tire, or for the same reason they buy someone they hardly know a beer, or why they help a friend move.
Other people do it to learn how to write software. They figure that buy letting other people see and use their code, they will become a better programmer. Linux was started this way, incidentally. Arguing that Linux would be better, more popular, make people more money, whatever had Linus Torvalds tried to initially sell it would be a very, very hard argument to make.
Still others do it for moral reasons. It wasn't so long ago that all software was free, you know. Charging money for software is a fairly new concept.
Posted by wee at April 14, 2004 10:18 AM