I'm very happy to see the 100,000th post milestone. This continues to be one of the best communities of any open-source project, and I think the SME Server software has a great future and a long life ahead.
As to why I wrote it in the first place, I'll answer the question by explaining what personally motivated me.
In the late 90s, with a passion for software development and 10+ years of experience, I was starting to get more and more frustrated with the irrational, Dilbertesque business technology decisions I was seeing. As a consultant, I had recently written an application based on CORBA for a major customer. The end users loved it and I was well paid, but the software got shelved because of a corporate edict standardizing on a different middleware vendor with a buggy, incomplete CORBA implementation.
Around that time, NT servers were getting installed all over the place, replacing Solaris servers. The NT servers were a lot cheaper, but the increased babysitting requirements swamped the cost savings. I'd been used to reliable file servers and email since the 80s, but as I started working for smaller companies, I found myself experiencing more and more system crashes, data losses, corrupted email messages, and so on. It felt like the industry was losing its way, and software development was getting a lot less fun.
Then in 1995 I bought my first Red Hat CD box set, and became a passionate Linux advocate from then on. I used Linux at home and at work as a development platform, porting C++, Modula-3 and Java software to NT at the last minute for delivery to customers. I snuck Linux into server rooms to replace NT boxes. The Linux boxes never crashed.
Bob Young said something to me once that I thought was right on the money, and have never forgotten. He said that Linux isn't about a better mousetrap, or about saving money on license fees. It's about control. What all Linux lovers have in common is: We're all control freaks. And that's what was so great for me - Linux allowed me to retake control over my life as a software developer.
Over the next couple of years I worked at two startup companies, and inevitably got the entrepreneur bug myself. In 1998 while travelling in Turkey I met a seasoned entrepreneur from Boston (a great guy called Alan Becker who sadly passed away a couple of years ago). I spent many long hours talking with him, and that's when I made the decision to start my own company. The story from that point is documented here:
http://www.powerframe.com/e-smith/history/So why did I do it? I was in love with Linux, I wanted to start a company, and I saw a potential business opportunity in providing inexpensive, high-quality network infrastructure for small business. From that point, I ended up going down a track that kind of had its own life.
In these last five years, I've had some of the best and the worst times of my life. But one of the best things has been the people I've met as part of the e-smith community, from the devinfo list, to the bulletin boards, to the team that joined e-smith in 2000 and 2001, who worked their asses off, and turned the software into a truly world-class server. Still the best developers I know, and nice people to boot.
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Joe Morrison
http://www.powerframe.com/
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