The popular fallacy, repeated by economy textbooks, is that people invented money to replace burdensome barter (exchanging goods for other goods) with something simpler. This is not true, or not the whole story at least. The missing piece is debt. Proto-money At first, there were nice looking things that took some time to collect or process. Shells, metals, pretty stones. Some thought ‘anyone can go pick up some shells, and we all want pretty necklaces, knives and sculptures, but this is pretty time-consuming and I had better grow some food; let me grow some extra to feed these kids who collect the pretty shells’. ...
Today is the day 70 (or so) since I started selling 1-Click Linux, which is free software, released under GPLv3+ license. Yes, I do believe free / libre / open source software can be released and sold for money, just like DRM-free e-books. No tracking. And no freemium - a clean contract: you watch a demo then give me money - I give you a file. The problem is, I do not have a big follower base. Neither do I have a load of money to pour into advertising. And I honestly think that the whole advertising business is the reason behind much evil currently happening out there. The current figures are a couple visitors to the website each day, one in 20 of these wants to see the price, and one sale so far. I have no idea whether these are people or bots, but it is a data point. (The sale is an actual person though.) ...
A bit of history GIF is the oldest widespread compressed image format. Today, it is mostly famous for allowing animations in an image file, but I am not so interested in that use. Actually, it turns out this was the only image format ever supported by NCSA Mosaic. Your website must have a GIF fallback for all critical images if it ever wants to truly support old browsers. I’m not talking old as in old Chromium. I mean actual Mosaic, Netscape, IE, Netsurf, Dillo, Konqueror - like those you can try on oldweb.today. (You are probably not interested in supporting them, but this is a fun exercise.) ...
1-Click Linux alpha has been released just now! You can buy it now at a price of a T-shirt. I added some demo videos so that you know what you get before you pay. The bottom line is, you can download two files, click through a wizard, and watch your Windows PC reboot into ZorinOS with no settings tweaking or external storage media. You should definitely check it out, because I believe this will be the near future of OS distribution, because in 2026 virtually all laptops and pre-built PCs are coming with Windows preinstalled. Not to mention the hardware you already have. ...
Announcing 1-Click Linux: this time I made something so self-contained and so near the ‘finished’ state that I would like to sell it. Yes, I do believe free / libre / open source software can be released and sold for money, just like DRM-free e-books. With no tracking. The project is basically a nice-looking .exe that guides the user through an installation wizard and reboots to a live GNU/Linux system. I wonder if there is someone who would be interested in testing it, or even buying. ...