swizzy.org is a not for profit organization focused primarily on developing free tools that make writing cool programs easier. We'd very much like to keep working on or freeware tools full time, but we're not independently wealthy (yet), and so we also need some income to eat and pay the rent. In the hopes of reducing the time we need to spend at 'real' jobs, we offer a few shareware programs, and ask a small fee for them. If enough people purchase them, then we'll be able to concentrate more time on free-ware development.

What's Your Name, Little URL...

I first heard the term "swizzy" used by a friend of mine [1] when he and I were both contracting together. He used it to describe things that weren't just functional, but were also well designed and stylish. Think "snazzy", but with a bit of a technological bent to it.

When swizzy.org was in its infancy (we're in our terrible two's now) we found ourselves constantly asking the same question about things we were working on: "Is it Swizzy?" If the answer was, "Heck yeah!" [2] we knew we were on the right track. If not, it was back to the drawing board.

When it came time to take our show on the road, we asked "What's name should we use for our .org?" Clearly, whatever it was going to be, it was agreed that the name should be a swizzy one. We tried a number of made up techno-words, all of which seemed way too contrived [3], and ultimately settled on the obvious choice.

The Price of Free-dom

So why did we decide to practically give our stuff away, you might ask? (Go ahead and ask, I'll wait...) Simply put, we wanted people to use our stuff. Licenses like GNU make it hard for stuff to appear in commercial products, while commercial EULAs prevent stuff from being shared. In the end we were inspired by the simple license used by the authors of the ZLIB library, and since that license had no license to protect it, we took artistic license (i.e., stole it) and reworded it to suit our own purposes.

The result is a license that protects us against being sued (a very good thing), and identifies swizzy.org as the only official source of the code in order to prevent companies like M$ from seizing control of the standard (also a good thing). For the rest, everyone's free to use our stuff to make better software.

A Brief Swiztory Lesson

The whole swizzy.org thing was started by Martin and me (Peter.) Martin and I worked for a consulting firm called Digital Video Art. When I interviewed him, I thought he would be a good addition to the team. After he started work for us it quickly became apparent that I was right. We got along well, and I found him to be very smart and a great programmer. Unfortunately, at the time he joined the company, he and I were two of only three full-time engineers, and out of necessity were assigned to different projects. Worse still, mine was off-site. As a result, for more than two years, we didn't get to interact much.

By the time my off-site contract had ended, the company had grown quite a bit. But because Martin and I were now the "senior" engineers, we always got assigned as technical leads on different projects. The one thing that had gotten better though, was that I was now back in the office full time, and I could occasionally walk into Martin's office and ask "Wacha doin'?" Well, he'd show me very cool things and I'd always say "Wow, that's sooo awesome.... but wouldn't it be really swizzy if it was like this?" [4] Sometimes Martin would tell me to get lost, but most of the time he was actually able to make my crazy suggestions work. This only reemphasized for both of us that working together on something would produce some really cool software.

After another year or so, by some strange luck, Martin and I finally got the chance to work together. To say the least, the time spent was magical: designing stuff was never a battle of egos: we both just wanted to make the best software possible. Sometimes he had better ideas. Sometimes I did. But most often, the best solution was a fusion of both our ideas. Similarly, our approach to coding (while not the same) fused in a way to produce superior software in very little time. The end result was a lot of really great code, and an awesome collaborative experience.... for a very short time. As it turned out, Martin was needed on another project, and I was told to bring some junior engineers up to speed on my project to replace him.

Sadly, it was pretty apparent that working together was going to continue to be the exception to the rule. So one day Martin stopped by my office as he was leaving for the day, and handed me an envelope with a letter in it. Since he had been pretty unhappy at work lately, I was convinced it was a resignation letter. In fact it turned out to be a letter in which he candidly confessed how much he really enjoyed working together, and asked if we couldn't come up with something of our own to work on... maybe just as a hobby... on the side.

Well I jumped at the chance. I wrote him a letter back (see, we're both coders, so writing the stuff down gave us a chance to debug our thoughts before releasing them), and said "OK, but only if we're serious about it." [5]

It turns out that we were, and after two years of working together in our off time, we have finally come up with something that we're both proud of and wanted to share with others.

Natural Logo-Rhythms

The Sigma-Plus logo that represents swizzy.org came from the fact that Martin and my best work is almost always a fusion of two ideas. We always seem to see things from different, but compatible angles that when brought together produces something that is almost always much stronger than the sum of its parts. A word for something that is more than the sum of its parts is synergy. The Sigma-Plus logo seemed to cleanly capture the sense of synergy that is anything swizzy.

1. His name, for anyone who cares, is Ken Faber, of the inimitable Fabers of NYC. Where he got the term from, I have no idea.
   
   
2. Or any of a number of other phases, most of which are not fit to print.
   
   
3. You know the techno-pretentious kind of company names I mean, like (and yes, all of these are real company names) Infinium, Aventis, Vitria, Avolent, Teligent, Agillion, or Ben & Jerry's.
   
   
4. This is how Martin learned the term swizzy.
   
   
5. These documents were in fact letters and not simple notes, because they went into greater (and sometimes sappier) detail than described here. However, the point was generally the same. We still keep those two letters filed away in a hermetically sealed display case (much like the United States Declaration of Independence) as a reminder of the principles on which swizzy.org was founded.