Coding Towards Infinity

Three years ago, I wrote an extension to The Gimp, an open source image editing program, allowing users to create text representations of their images. For example, here’s a picture of the Linux mascot, Tux:

And here's the same image after my extension has created an all-text version (you might need to look at the enlarged image to actually see the text):

The script had a few fancy options, like being able to select different fonts and sizes, plus it could read huge amounts of text (say, if you wanted to paint a picture of Hunter S. Thompson with the words from Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas). It only took me an afternoon, and I was fairly pleased with how it worked.

Being one of those no-good Free Software types, I placed it on my old web site under a license known as the GPL, which gives anybody the right to use, distribute and modify the program, providing that they continue to allow access to the source code (and any changes they may have made). I added it to a website which lists various different additions for The Gimp, and promptly forgot about it.

Today, I was searching through Google, and came across a link to my code. Only it was on a different website from my old one. Curious, I started another Google search, looking for references to my program. It seems to have spread far and wide across the world. People have made additions and changes to my original work; updating it to work with the new version of The Gimp, and bundling it with a bunch of other programs and selling the collection on CD.

Scattered across the world, in thousands of different places, my name still resides in the source code. It'll remain there until the CDs biodegrade, roughly a hundred years from now. I'm not quite sure how to deal with that.

currently playing: Mercury Rev - Delta Sun Bottleneck Stamp