Being Dan Bricklin
There are programming legends, and then there
are
programming legends. Dan Bricklin certainly belongs to the second group. I got a chance to speak with the 'father of the spreadsheet' a few weeks back for a story appearing in the November
issue of Redmond Developer News. Back in the 1979, Bricklin's VisiCalc
erupted onto the computing scene, emerging as the first 'killer app' of the personal computing age -- you can check out the history of VisiCalc at
Bricklin's
site . To this day, VisiCalc remains the benchmark against which
other killer apps must be judged.
So when our conversation turned to open source
software, we wondered: Has the open source community produced its
own killer app? Bricklin was quick to respond, singling out the Apache
Web server and Linux operating system. But he extends the argument
a bit when he says: "The Internet itself turned out to be one
(a killer app for open source). The Internet needed open source to
get there because a lot of the basis for the Internet comes from
open source components. This is how we realized it was valuable."
What's really interesting is that Bricklin thinks
Microsoft might finally appreciate the value of open
source software. He says Ray Ozzie has been pushing hard against
the lock-em-down forces of Craig Mundie in Redmond. The recent extension
of the Microsoft
Open Specification Promise program certainly bodes well. The
software colossus has loosed the strings on a host of
code, including once-protected bits like SenderID email authentication.
As for Bricklin, he's plenty busy running a boutique
outfit called Software Garden. His current project is
a spreadsheet-inspired Web authoring tool,
called
wikiCalc , that lets groups of people create and maintain Web
pages using fast and proven wiki editing approaches. [
Read
the Q&A]
Posted by Michael Desmond on 11/07/2006