Contributing to the common good
Pay It Forward
"maddog" reflects on ways people can contribute to the present as well as the future of software development.
Once upon a time, there was a movie about a little boy who decided to do a random act of kindness and then asked the recipient not to "pay it back" but to "pay it forward" – that is, to do three random acts of kindness for other people. Over the course of the movie, these random acts came back to help the boy and his family improve.
In the same way, I have seen how "paying it forward" has made a difference in the free software movement, and I would like to share a few of these stories with you.
For example, I have told the story before of how I got Linus Torvalds his first Alpha processor – a machine worth about US$ 30,000 in 1994 – not through writing a business proposal or justifying the expense to management but by asking various people for whom I had done favors over the years at Digital Equipment Corporation to "pay me back" for some of those favors.
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