An Appreciation of Project Gutenberg Founder Michael S. Hart
Some people might think I am anti progress because of the way I attack aspects of the cyber sphere. They’re wrong, I was involved in internetworking before cutesy pie term like internet, web, and cloud were coined. Thus I know how good it could have been so how bad it is disappoints me. This is why I was saddened by the early death of one of the unsung good guys.
Long before The Evil EmpireGoogle began to scrape up out-of-copyright and non-copyright material from wherever it could be scraped and then assert their own copyright over content that rightly belonged in the public domain, before the mad scientist Tim Berners Lee (and interfering busybody who would not listen to the people who knew what they were doing) created the travesty that grew into the World Wide Web, even before Microsoft destroyed your right to privacy and Facebook stole your personal data, internetworking technology was in the hands of good guys.
Years before even I was involved in the business of networking computers, and bear in mind, in internet timescales I am almost as old as any Enochian demon, there was The Word. And the word was with Project Gutenberg.
Last week I was saddened to hear of the death of Michael Stern Hart the person who founded Project Gutenberg. at the relatively early age of 64.
Hart, commonly considered the founder of the ebook although he always denied this, died at his Illinois home, according to a representative of Renner-Wikoff Chapel and Crematory.
Though Michael Hart’s brainchild did not make him a rich man in the way that other internet pioneers became stupendously rich by peddling computer solutions that were to put it very bluntly, “not fit for purpose”, he does not appear to have ever been motivated by wealth. People who knew him said Project Gutenberg was his life and his love. To earn a living he was happy to be a college lecturer.
The non profit project he founded was manned using a network of volunteers dedicated to providing free online access to as many books as could be converted to an electronic format, in particular classical and ancient works as well as scholarly writings on a wide range of topics. Project Gutenberg was the first organisation to make works as diverse as the plays of Shakespeare, Homer’s epics, the books of Brauch Spinoza and the writings of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein available online.
Project Gutenberg will live on, the oriflamme will be picked up by Hart’s many followers and supporters who like him are motivated by a genuine love of learning and enlightenment to share knowledge freely. Note how unlke the attitude of commercial organisations that claim altruistic motives but really are motivated by profit and control this philosophy is.
A friend of mine on a US site, who posts as Joe Schitte, says there is no such thing as altruism and he has a valid point. Michael Hart was in a way motivated by self interest, what he did was driven by his great love of and passion for doing it. Project Gutenberg was never conceived as a path to riches, fame or power. for Hart it was a joy, the consuming obsession that gave meaning to his life. To that extent it was self interest.
But Mother Teresa was, was she not, primarily motivated by earning herself a place in heaven?
Martin Luther King was, was he not, set on a course of making for himself a place in history? You may disagree but ask yourself why the USA does not celebrate Rosa Parkes day.
And heart transplant pioneer Christian Barnard was motivated by competitiveness with other leading surgeons around the world to be first to successfully replace a human heart.
All those other “altruistic” people too, people credited with putting the common good before self interest were, were they not, driven by an emotional need to be seen by their peers as good?
Only history will judge whether Michael Stearn Hart’s work freed our cultural heritage from it’s bondage between the covers of expensive books or paved the way for some really evil bastards to grab control of information that should never have belonged to anybody, in order to profit from it. If you are one of those people who conflates technological advance with progress, consider this: You may think the web is “free” but how many sites do you visit that are not serving you “targeted ads”, a practice I find fascistic and repugnant?
For now the death of Michael Hart is sad but the world is a better place for his having lived.
Michael Hart – The Guardian
Obituary on Project Gutenberg website
Project Gutenberg Home Page
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