From the archives: Jim Butterfield
From Compute! Sept 1982, reprinted on commodore.ca:
The Butterfield homestead is a modest brick house within walking distance of downtown Toronto. It is comfortably cluttered with books" plants, computers, and three cats. Even the attic is pressed into service as storage space for whatever books and computers Jim Butterfield cannot cram into his small office.[...]
"I decided to find out what this 'micro' stuff was all about and started watching the current magazines," he says. "1 finally decided to purchase when I saw a completely pre-built machine called a KIM 1, which had a 6502 microchip in it. That turned out to be like a return to the past. Everything we had been doing a dozen years before on the large $1.5 million computer, we were doing again on this little $250 board including making the same mistakes." [...]
Lecturing and teaching, such as the machine language course he conducts each month for a special interest division ofTPUG, provide him with feedback about problems and areas where people need more information. He has a reputatifor being generous with his time, and his phone in open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday to Friday.
"If somebody phones me up and asks a question which shows they just haven't bothered trying it themselves. then I will sometimes be a little short, because it does seem like a waste of my time," he says. "But most people who call do so because they're stuck on something. It's just a question of getting another opinion. If I get a number of inquiries in a certain area, that's usually a signal that it's time for me to write an article about it. It's a very good way of keeping posted on what's bothering people at the moment."
Butterfield is equally generous with his software. He rarely sells any of his programs. "I would like to foster an environment where people pass out their software with reasonable generosity. I think that by showing a good example, I might sort of lead the way in that." Often he distributes his work on TPUG's library disk.
Still, Butterfield'vehemently supports an author's copyright: "I believe very strongly that the person writing an original program has the right to do as he chooses with that program. If he chooses to sell itor to request that it not be copied except for a fee, then he has absolutely that right."
However, he feels that a person who takes money for software is obligated to support that program by upgrading it and furnishing the means to modify it, if necessary. "That's another good reason to give programs away. I really feel that most people who put down a lot of money for software feel that they are not buying a disk or cassette tape, but they are buying a service..'
posted Tue 9 Dec 2003 in /computers/history | link
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