The PegaSoft Revolutionary Karaoke Polka

My father claimed that success was simple: either you go out and make a lot of money, or you're stupid. The money is just sitting out there, waiting for someone. So only stupid people were poor--people too stupid to get away from the TV and pursue opportunity.

He never took into account the support of his family, the economic times or other external factors. My grandparents invested several several hundred thousand dollars into his company. He started it during the economic boom of the 1960's. The conditions are different today. 2/3rds of aged 25-54 Canadians underemployed or working under substandard conditions (Lone Coder - April). There is a lack of investments by Canadian families. The Canadian economy is sluggish, with low unemployment due to high numbers of people on welfare, not because jobs are readily available (the unemployment rate doesn't include people on welfare). Good people are falling through the cracks more often (Lone Coder - January).

My father tied success with self-worth. The fact he made money proved (in his mind) he was better than other people, smarter than his friends. A recent thread on a mailing list asked about the Linux job situation in the Toronto area. Is the Linux job market bucking the Statistics Canada trends? I spoke last week with a guy who had been looking for solid work for 8 years, living with his parents because he has no other choice.

Sometimes you'll see something I call the "Talk Show" phenomenon. You see someone at the top of his profession on a late night talk show, say a professional basketball player, who says, "Anybody can get into the NBA. I got in. If you can't get in, you must be stupid. " It's easy to say anyone can do it if you are one who beat the odds. That doesn't mean the odds aren't accurate. In the same way, it's easy to say that unemployed people are stupid if you ran a successful company in the 1960's, or have found long-term employment in a stable company in the 1990's. The reality for the masses of people may be quite different, especially for the reasons discussed in my April column.

Rather than using employment as a measure of self-worth, let's look at the realities of the IT industry. In "Chris Crawford on Game Design", gaming legend Chris Crawford told the story of Bill Carris, a smart, hard working developer at Atari. When Atari collapsed in the 1980's, Carris lost his job. Despite his resume and references, he was unable to get even a junior programming position. He killed himself with a gun. As Crawford put it, "Business is indeed a war in the sense the the casualties are real." Unemployment can be fatal.

After June's column on dealing with job stress as an IT professional, there were concerns that I was unemployed. Perhaps some thought that I wouldn't write about stress if I was successfully employed. Well, the truth is, I am working on a contract and am making more money than I've made in a long time. But I know about the dark side of the IT world. I've been there. I've seen it. Just because I'm employed right now doesn't mean I'm going to ignore the realities facing my fellow developers.

I was reading or watching something on television last month about the culture clash between people under 40 and people over 40 in the business world. The proposition was that people under 40 were people who were familiar with and played video games. In games, you can't master a game without failing. You expect to "die" in the game before you win. On the other hand, most businesses are helmed by people over 40 who made their fortunes in the affluent 1960's and 1970's where success came easily. They run their companies as if the slightest mistake could bring them down. As a result, they not only play it safe but they never learn anything new and never innovate their products.

Consider PegaSoft. Fresh out of university in the 1990's, I wanted to create an shareware company producing innovative computer software. PegaSoft began with Ed Brzezinski and myself, writing games, compilers and other software for the Apple II and Intel 386 computers. When Ed and I parted ways, I teamed up with Dan Braun to form an Internet company supplying email and Usenet news services in Niagara before other companies were around.

With the advent of live Internet, we moved out of networking into developing Linux software. Our first project was "System Manager in a Box", a AI-driven commercial diagnostic tool that ran over 2000 system checks that was to become one of a set of system administration tools. We developed a prototype version, SMiaB 1.0, and began courting companies looking for a business partner. That's when three team members began getting greedy, began demanding bigger shares of future profits and insisting that others on the team be thrown out. Despite my efforts to smooth things over, the team went their separate ways and refused to repay their portions of the loan I took out to finance the company. To this day, I'm still struggling to repay the loan.

Learning from my mistakes, I reinvented PegaSoft again. I opened it up to the public and began looking at open source as an option for running a business. PegaSoft became the first Linux group to meet in St. Catharines, having monthly meetings open to the public. Thus began my idea to have an "open" company: a company that had nothing to hide, where the community could participate as well as be educated. However, Linux was practically unknown in the technological backwater of Niagara. In 2001, PegaSoft began to hold meetings in Toronto. I hosted a series of open source workshops, programming contests, and held annual computer retreats.

In 2004, PegaSoft began focusing on being an association of Linux consultants. At the meetings we discussed how PegaSoft could act as a client liaison, quality control peer reviewer and dispute arbitrator. When the first client pulled out, once again team members left--presumably because there was no money on the line. In 2005, we started a massive multiplayer online game project in the hopes that having a project to work on would spur the interest of Toronto area developers, to give people a reason to trust one another and work together.

It's been 15 years since the release of my first shareware game, "Quest for the Hoard". (If you have an Apple IIgs emulator, most of PegaSoft's original Apple II shareware is still available for download.) PegaSoft has continued to reinvent itself in the face of changing market opportunities. It has challenged people's thinking and inspired new efforts. But it's never earned a profit. Does that make it, as my father would have said, "stupid"?

One person commented on a mailing list that my efforts to foster team work, educate and promote open source were "stunts". That is, that efforts without enough money behind them cannot qualify as serious or inspire people. I can't apologize for something I don't have. I'm from a backwater farming community. I don't have connections. I don't have money to invest. But isn't it better to do than to not do? Isn't it better to ask the questions that other people are afraid to? I mean, I've made repeated efforts to call on people to band together and do some real "events"...and have received silence and indifference. I don't know what more I could reasonably have done.

When my father made his successful business in the 1960s, a business based on innovative technology, his success came because of business connections, quality people and family investment. Every successful computer business I know came about because people knew someone who needed work, knew someone who would put up money, and knew dependable people to make it happen. In my case, I had none of those things. I had no family members to invest money. I was from an isolated community who needed computer skills as much as they needed one of those fancy horseless carriages. And the quality of people I found has been demonstrated by the history of the business. It's not a matter of being smart or stupid. Nobody can expect business success in the face of so many hurtles. The only solution is to work together and pool resources to make the impossible possible.

Consider, for example, my "Business Shell" (BUSH), a cutting-edge project for Linux. For 5 years, I've been trying to recruit open source developers in Toronto to assist me in polishing off this project. Some developers went off and created their own rival products to show how smart they were. Some asked "Where's the money?" I've been unable to find anyone to contribute even a single line of code. BUSH is based on software standards used by NASA. NASA is experimenting Linux rovers (LinuxDevices). BUSH could be on it's way to Mars. How cool would that be? Not cool enough for Toronto. Lawrence Law, a former co-worker who used to work in Silicon Valley, said this kind of project would be guaranteed successful in California. But here in Ontario, where money talks and egotism talks louder, a project like BUSH hasn't got a chance of leaving Canada let alone visiting the stars.

This goes back to the quote from Steve Jobs at the top of this column. I'm from a technological backwater. I know that that you either work together or you die. How long until people, as Jobs says, get it? How long until the people in Ontario get back to reality, support one another and start seriously backing the future of computing?

I am not stupid. Through PegaSoft, I continue to pursue my ideals that the group is stronger than the individual, the companies should be open, that there is more to be gained by sharing together and working together than by fighting one another. The most difficult thing I've found about innovation is, with so many unproven paths to chose from, what mountain to tackle next. If victory could be guaranteed, there'd be no reason to risk failure. Will we continue to walk on each other's backs and remain the valleys or will we brace on each other's shoulders climb to new heights?

In the meantime, the Lone Coder will be like Gulliver, asking the questions society doesn't want to hear, playing my tune for anyone who will listen. I will reinvent but I will never retreat. Hoping that, someday, my people will get it.

Talk back on the Linux Cafe.

September 17, 2006 

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