Lou Montulli: Jim got us superexcited. He is a very energetic, charismatic person when he wants to be, and he was giving us the full sell. He changed our perspective from “We just want to keep working on the web” to “We are going to go to Silicon Valley, we are going to change the fabric of the universe, and we are going to basically rule the planet.” To have somebody like that believe in us and want to work with us to go change the world is very exciting. We were excited. I was personally very excited.

Brian Behlendorf: We did not want the web to be owned by anybody, and felt that at least at the layer of web protocols, getting pages to people, we felt like the web server is like the printing press. All of us were running our own printing operations—building interesting websites, building interesting stuff. We just did not want to wake up one morning and find out that we had to start paying a tax to do the things that we had been doing for free before. It was very much an idealism kind of thing. It was inherited from where a lot of internet technology had come from, which is this idea that tech should be public and distributed. It is not necessarily the same point of view as saying, “All software should be free.”

Jim Clark: I said, “You do not get it. The only way the internet is going to be is if it is financed by businesses and operated by businesses, because the government cannot continue to put money into it ad nauseam. It has to be a commercial medium.” The gnashing of teeth! The wailing! And I got so much hate mail and nasty e-mails that you just would not believe it.