Bonum Certa Men Certa

Sharing Code and Recipes

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 16, 2025,
updated Jul 16, 2025

Bread cake just from toaster

Today I was looking at some recipes in Geminispace. Yes, Gemini Protocol has attracted some whole capsules which focus on cooking and contain loads of recipes. Images and tables are not required for this sort of thing.

My wife and I have good chemistry; [sarcasm] she likes to cook and I like to eat [/sarcasm]

[Well, not purely sarcasm]

Anyway, I've also liked to share my code since I was a kid. The first time I did that I think I was 13 or 14. I put the code on a floppy disk.

A floppy disk or diskette was more than enough to contain even very large computer programs. We didn't need 100 GB of "game assets" or bloated libraries weighing at hundreds of megabytes. We still got by.

To me, it's very difficult to recall ever not sharing (or keeping) code that I wrote. Even in workplaces it was implicitly agreed that I could keep my code free. I still have (on old disks) some code I wrote decades ago, just in case I want to pull it out again to use or upload. As far as I know, I already uploaded all of it to my Web site back in the CVS era (not even SVN, let alone Git).

RMS likes to talk about proprietary software as a concept being as absurd as refusing to share a recipe of some nice dish with a curious house guest. I like this analogy. I use it a lot. It helps explain the triviality of software freedom. Sometimes RMS says that teachers naturally teach pupils to share, especially when they produce some nice things.

Why is it that the "mainstream" "pop" culture relegated such logic to a niche, fringe thing, even equating it with piracy?

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