User:Frodo

Why am I here?
Having worked many years in the "real" world of work - school teaching, carpentry, retail, proofreading, and other odd jobs, I went back to school to get a degree in Computer Science. I had two reasons to go back, 1) I worked with computers a lot anyway, and wanted to get paid for my expertise, and 2) I wanted to be able to make my computers do things not available in the commercial market. Having got a Master of Science degree in CS, I realized that what was technically possible for a computer (thus a programmer) to do and what it was legal to do were two different things. I agree with Richard Stallman that software wants to be free. In particular, software patents should be banned as unworkable, stifling, and detrimental to the public good. I also believe that once an author is dead, his or her work should pass into the public domain within a reasonable period of time.