Seikilos Blog

Richard Stallman, the father of the Free Software movement, said in an interview:

It doesn't matter how an application is developed, provided that we can always use it with freedom. A free program, be it technically superior or inferior, is always ethically superior. If a program is technically inferior but free, we can make it better. If it's not free, we can't set it free, we must reject it.

This is the strongest and the weakest point of the Free Software philosophy. On the one hand, the stubborn Richard Stallman was able to create a whole world that many people like me benefit by. On the other hand, a lot of bad software is allowed and even welcome just because is free. The Free Software world advances slowly, because most capitalist companies won't invest a single penny on it (no profit in the foreseeable future), and also because the idealists (mostly students) who build the applications are often purists or inexperienced programmers. In any event, the movement advances, and already worried the Microsoft empire.

From Kipling's Jungle Book:

What of the hunting, hunter bold?
Brother, the watch was long and cold.
What of the quarry ye went to kill?
Brother, he crops in the jungle still.
Where is the power that made your pride?
Brother, it ebbs from my flank and side.
Where is the haste that ye hurry by?
Brother, I go to my lair--to die.

Rereading Kipling these days brought me a feeling I used to have now and then throughout the last fifteen years: that a big part of Michael Ende's "Neverending Story" was copied from somewhere else, and such feeling was naturally undermining the excellent perception I had about that book when I first read it. That was when I was very young, and very virgin about other books. At that time I couldn't know that the Sphynx with all the misteries of the world in its eyes was a reflex of an ancient Greek myth. I couldn't know that the two doors between the real world and the world of fantasy (through lies or true imagination) mentioned by the Childlike Empress was already present in Homer's Odyssey and Virgil's Eneid. I couldn't know about the Greek resonance of the names of Artax and Argax, that the Arabian Nights (or The Thousand and One Nights) was present with the yinnies (genies) and with the Semitic sound of Al-Tsahir, that India was there with Sikanda or the lawless Shlamoofs, a mirror of the equally lawless Bandar-log from Kipling's Jungle Book. By that time I had barely read Borges, so the unmistakable reference to The Library of Babel present in Ende's City of Ancient Emperors passed in front of my eyes unnoticed; I didn't know that Hysbald, Hykrion and Hydorn were there to represent the Celtic chivalry saga, that the myth of the Eternal Return triggered by the Old Man of Wandering Mountain was as old as Plato, and still echoed in Nietzsche, I couldn't know that Atreyu was a significant name. By that time I did know Tolkien, and I noticed that Auryn, with its corruptive power, was inspired by the One Ring, but I couldn't know the Latin source of its name (aurum=gold).
Today I read again "The Neverending Story", and I can't help but take my hat to the late Ende. Now I understand that all of those noble references were there as a bigger and global metaphor: of course the Land of Fantasia is a land built from all the stories invented by the humans throughout history, and all those allusions I mentioned briefly are not but symbols or parts of that metaphor. To make the character of his book even more "neverending", Ende invented a few outstanding stories himself, so to contribute with more imagination to the endless book of human inventions, the foundations of the Land of Fantasy.