AT FIRST, the point of coding is to give everything away. Pure philanthropy. He’ll find a marvelous seed program in the public domain. Then he’ll flesh it out, add new features, switch on his 1,200-baud modem, dial in to a local bulletin board, and upload the source for anyone who wants to grow it some more. Soon his creatures propagate on hosts across the planet. Every day people around the globe add new species to the repositories. It’s the Cambrian Explosion all over again, only a billion times faster.
Neelay gives away his first masterpiece, a turn-based romp where you play a Japanese movie monster eating its way across the world’s metropolises. Hundreds of people in a dozen countries grab it, even at forty-five minutes per download. So what if playing it does to your free time what the monsters do to Tokyo? His second game—conquistadores ravaging the virgin Americas—is another freeware hit. A Usenet group forms just to trade game strategies. The program generates a new, geologically realistic New World each time you play. It turns any grocery store bag boy into stout Cortez.
His games spawn imitations. The more people steal from him, the better Neelay feels about his chair-bound life. The more he gives away, the more he has. From his vantage, stranded in his wheelchair in a basement lab, whole new continents swing into view. The gift economy—free duplication of well-shaped commands—promises to solve scarcity at last and cure the hunger at the heart’s core. The name Neelay Mehta grows mini-legendary among the pioneers. People thank him on dial-up boards and in game news groups. College kids talk about him in chat rooms as if he’s some Tolkien character. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a beached, elongated freak, unable to move without machines.
But by his eighteenth birthday, paradise is sprouting fences. Former philanthropists of free code start taking out copyrights and making actual coin. They even have the nerve to form private companies. Granted, they’re still just peddling floppy discs in baggies, but it’s clear how things will go. The commons are getting enclosed. The gift culture will be throttled in the cradle.
Neelay blasts the betrayal at each week’s meeting of the Home-Rolled Club. He spends his free time re-creating one of the most famous commercial offerings, improving on it, then releasing the clone into the public domain. Infringement? Maybe. But every one of the so-called copyrighted properties relies on decades of prior unpaid art. For a year, Neelay plays Robin Hood, camped out in the anarchic forest with his merry men, under a massive oak older than the deed to the land it grows on.