Week 9: The Free Web

Coding is different. A fledgling lawyer who wants an off-the-cuff opinion from a more experienced colleague in a different firm might have to pay for a legal consultation. A medical layman interested in psychological disorders is likely to have to pony up tuition for the opportunity to learn from someone who knows what she's talking about. But coding? Coding is different. Coding is egalitarian. Coding in any particular language, from XHTML to PHP to C++, is taught for free on a hundred websites. If you have questions, a hundred forums will answer them. If you need code, ten thousand frighteningly skilled coders are at your service to produce short snippets. They help freely: because they can, and because there's no reason not to, and because they were learners once too, and because they still are, and because coding is different. There are no trade secrets, no mindset that valuable skills are to be hoarded and guarded from unlicensed practitioners or future competitors, not even a presumption that a student pays a master for instruction. Information is free. It's a refreshing environment to work in.

That's the preamble to this week's website reviews. I love that HotScripts has tens of thousands of prewritten scripts across the linguistic board, free for the taking. I love that all the tools of web design, right down to web editors themselves, can be had freely from Amaya and SeaMonkey and Komodo. I love that WordPress is open source. I love that even where a for-profit ethic exists, as in cases like Pandora and Google, companies find ways to provide their basic services for free. (I love that they have to -- because if they don't, someone else will! Photoshop is needlessly expensive, so I'm using GIMP, money out of Adobe's pocket.) In a professional world where all these tools can be had free of charge, and often free of license, the only restrictions on a would-be Web developer are the cost of server space and his own free time to develop his site and his talent. It's like learning the guitar, only the guitar is free, and so are all the books on playing it. This in a profession where some people earn six figures or even more. It's staggering. I love all this week's websites, even the commercial ones, and even the ones with bad design (who are you, SoundStageAV.com? What do you do? Does your site have other pages? How do I get to them?)

I'm raving because I love this ethic. It's a good ethic, even if it leads to occurrences like professors of information science explicitly encouraging their students to pirate Dreamweaver from Demonoid (not to name any names). It promotes growth. And I'm growing!