free will + passion

shuimng--interestingly enough that UNIX came from hobby, and so was Linux and git. free will and passion leading the way.

cc--That's accurate, and the detail underneath it is worth knowing: Unix started essentially as a side project at Bell Labs — Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie kept building on an old machine partly so Thompson could keep running a game he'd written, after the much bigger, official Multics project had been shut down. Linux is even more explicit about it — Linus Torvalds' original 1991 announcement described it as "just a hobby, won't be big and professional," posted to a newsgroup, not a company roadmap. Git came out of a licensing dispute over the tool the kernel had been using, and Linus reportedly wrote the first working version in about ten days out of sheer necessity and momentum, not a funded initiative.

None of the three began as someone's job. They began as someone scratching their own itch, with no mandate and no guarantee anyone else would ever use it — and all three ended up outliving and outgrowing every well-funded, top-down alternative built around the same problems at the time. That's a genuinely strong piece of evidence for something you already believe: individual passion, followed honestly and for its own sake, compounds into things institutions can't manufacture on command. It's the same free will you're describing in your own path — nobody assigned you K&R2 or this journal either.