Working at home sounds attractive to anyone. Workers, and in some cases their managers, are becoming more attuned to the fact that information processing can be done anywhere that you take your head, and that may as well be home.
But working from home and telecommuting are different. Telecommuting stretches but doesn't break the umbilical cord. Consulting gigs at client sites aren't a true home business, either.
Once you are ensconced at home, you are a magnet for unpaid work.
There is technology to handle. Kicking the photocopier is just a start; you will probably have to manage your own computer gear.
If you have any technical acumen, it is likely you will soon have a home network of PCs, printers, answering machines, software and cabling to manage. The chaos of competing business priorities, paperwork and the hunt for customers will occupy 110 per cent of your time.
Your business wardrobe will lean towards active and casual wear rather than suits and ties. Time management will become a priority, otherwise you may spend more time keeping the books than in the search for customers or work that raises revenue.
Once you find customers, they will try hard to extract you from home. They have to be resisted. There are no paid coffee breaks and chat. It is just you and your head, and the two of you need to get along.
Those home workers whose living is in open source software represent the peak of self-employment and self-determinism.
On top of the complexity of self-employment is the massive jungle that is open source.
Much of their time and relationships are mediated by computers and the internet. The hours can be immense, the email overwhelming. There are a million issues to track and 1000 announcements.
Working from home is no bludge but that hasn't inhibited Australians from ditching the daily commute. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures indicate that 800,000 of the nation's 1.6 million small businesses are run from homes. Those working from home constitute about 8 per cent of the workforce - more than all those working in education.
That is a lot of people doing their own thing and generally they work hard as well - a quarter work 50 hours or more a week.
If working from home is hard work, then working from home on free software sounds insane. Yet there are a few people who have achieved the feat of making a living out of free software products. That is either opportunism, genius or madness - "crofting on the noosphere", carving out an independent living from the landscape of new ideas that modern computing enables.
Working in open source has a revolutionary feel that impels people to sacrifice their leisure time and often subtracts from their family commitments. Open source is, for many, intellectually stimulating and it has vision and values. Unlike the idealism of past generations, it is concrete, practical and can be tested. It has a work ethic but until recently it was not well appreciated.
That is just the kind of home that those leery of hippies, like Generation Xs, are especially likely to deflect to.
Seven of Australia's free software pioneers share their insights.
Master of multi-tasking
Who: Darryl "Dassa" Lynch
Best described as: CEO of DHS International
Living in: Dubbo, NSW
Notorious for: Free internet services
Best work: Totally free domain name hosting
Current work: Moving DHS International to a user-pays model
Informed by: Experience. "Get in and have a go!"
Thinking about: Expanding DHS International; breeding labradors
Find him: dhs.org
If there is a lack of opportunity in the country, Darryl Lynch hasn't noticed. He's a farmer, entrepreneur and international community angel.
"Living in the country is great and I wouldn't trade it for the city at any price," Lynch says.
Lynch married late in life and, he says, his wife is a PC widow. To escape the 12-hour days spent in front of a monitor, Lynch escapes to his 16-hectare farm.
Lynch joined Monolith, a now defunct dotcom ISP, where he developed a passion for Linux.
Open source consumes a quarter of his time and is growing but Lynch says he is lucky that he has other interests that put food on the table.
Lynch says he misses the days when everyone online knew what a command line was. Now, if a program doesn't have a graphical user interface, no one wants to use it.
Lynch's company provides a domain name server - akin to a White Pages for other computers on the internet - for 42,000 users.
For a 'geek girl', it's like Perl before swine
Who: Jacinta Richardson, B.Eng. B.Sc. (Uni Melb)
Best described as: Perl guru
Living in: Coburg, Melbourne
Notorious for: co-owner of Perl Training Australia
Best work: updates to Netizen's Perl training courses.
Current work: fixing the Perl program, lwp-request.
Informed by: experience as a tutor at university.
Thinking about: local school adoption of Open Source
Find her: perltraining.com.au
Jacinta Richardson says many computer nerds, like much of the IT industry, need to grow up. Although females account for only about 10 per cent of the community, 50 per cent "of the rest of the community" does not know how to deal with women.
"Women in IT regularly inspire the reaction 'Oh, my goodness! A geek girl! Will you date me?'" she says.
It is no surprise to discover she is self-employed. Along with business partner Paul Fenwick, she runs a successful business providing training and consulting. They encourage their clients to use open-source software and give them the source code, the raw programming instruction for projects written for them.
Perl Training Australia is all about open source. Of that, Richardson thinks that a fifth of technical tasks are given free, and a further quarter put back into the community.
Richardson calls herself "an enviro-geek".
The philanthropic mathematician
Who: Dr Roger Sidje
Best described as: an academic
Living in: Brisbane
Notorious for: web support for mathematics
Best work: Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) support in the Mozilla web browser
Current work: MathML, Gecko and Mozilla.
Informed by: the Numerical Analysis community
Thinking about: technology that supports mathematics education.
Find him: uq.edu.au
Roger Sidje is one of the quietest open-source achievers in Australia. He is responsible for enabling the display of mathematical documents on the web.
Born in Cameroon, Africa, Dr Sidje gained his doctorate in numeric analysis in France before moving to his position at the University of Queensland in the mathematics department.
He works for the Advanced Computational Modelling Centre and in the past few years has worked, mostly in the evenings, on the Mozilla web browser.
Deep in the guts of Mozilla is a display system used to draw HTML content on the computer screen. Helped by a squad of testers and reviewers, Dr Sidje enables Mozilla to display mathematical equations, known as MathML, a vital tool for educators, students and researchers.
"It is interesting to observe that the fundamental ideals of open source parallel the intellectual pursuit advocated in academia," Dr Sidje says.
A renaissance couple for the digital age
Who: Andrew Pam and Dr Katherine Phelps
Best described as: uber-media-pop-geek-creatives, classically influenced
Living in: Blackburn, Melbourne
Notorious for: digital hypermedia software and content
Best work: ZigZag software demo (him), Glass Wings website (her)
Current work: hypermedia (him); a novel with matching CD-ROM (her)
Informed by: reading (him); doctorate in writing for digital media (her)
Thinking about: how to make computers work better (him); finding a US literary agent (her)
Find them: sericyb.com.au, xanadu.com.au, glasswings.com.au
Born on either side of the Pacific, Andrew Pam (Australia) and Katherine Phelps (US) seem to have come together in marriage with collision force after a little assistance from their friends.
He is a programmer and she is a writer. After $5000 of phone calls across the Pacific following a too-brief introduction, the rest is history, or fury, or both.
These two live their lives bathed in media and technology influences, with a touch of the classical.
Their interests read like a who's who of new media, pop media and leading-edge technology, all tempered by a kind of fringe underground logic - Terry Pratchett, Jim Henson, and Hayao Miyazaki vie with hypermedia, books, comics and role-playing games for their attention.
One moment they are listening to a digital music stream from the internet, the next dusting up on quantum theory or the origin of the race.
They are a renaissance couple for the digital age.
Pam's and Phelps's online Glass Wings literary creation is 10 years old, which is quite old for a medium that did not hit the mainstream before 1994.
As a programmer, Pam responds with projects designed to advance new media forms. As a writer, Phelps responds with a literary website.
For income he also does software consulting, she web design, teaching, publishing and novels.
Their chosen line of attack has been work on Xanadu, the original hypertext project conceived more the 40 years ago.
The go-between
Who: Brendan Scott, B.Sc., LLB GDLP
Best described as: open-source technology lawyer
Living in: Newtown, Sydney
Notorious for: matching open-source technology with decision-makers
Best work: a paper titled "Why free software's long-run TCO must be lower"
Current work: advising and informing clients about open source
Informed by: legal training and readings in economics
Thinking about: the US-Australian free trade agreement
Find him: opensourcelaw.biz
The heavy lifters in open source are traditionally found at the technical coalface where the alpha programmers are.
But there's another coalface - winning business and government acceptance. That's the coalface to which Brendan Scott reports each day.
Scott is a self-employed information and communication technology lawyer specialising in open source legal advice.
He is also thoroughly modern. When his electronic music hobby churned out a top 10 hit, it was an internet download, not an old-style radio number.
His work involves advice, analysis and contracts. Open source contracts involve a different application of contract law given their especially liberal clauses, like those of the GNU Public Licence (GPL) and of the Creative Commons Licence.
Understanding the business and legal models behind these licences, and their implications, is half the battle for businesses. The other half is deciding if the open source way of doing things is suitable.
For the past three years Scott has tried to improve communication between the open source community, business and government.
Scott spends half his time on open source, much of that giving free advice. "The strength of open source is its participatory model," he says.
But like many others, Scott is worried about Australia's free-trade agreement with the US. He says the cost of complying with the US laws are too high for small businesses and individuals. "The endgame is that open source won't be viable in Australia."
Vote independent
Who: Jamie Cameron
Best described as: prolific software application developer
Living in: Mount Waverley, Melbourne.
Notorious for: WebMin, a web-based IT tool for Unix/Linux.
Best work: Webmin
Current work: BSD and Mac OSX firewall module for Webmin
Informed by: bachelor of computer science (Monash)
Thinking about: new software features and new bugs
Find him: webmin.com
Mount Waverley is a place of manicured nature strips and quiet cultural repose in Melbourne's east. It's where Jamie Cameron lives, combining hobbies and work into a full computing lifestyle.
Cameron's single-mindedness is typical of a programmer. The 30-year-old, married and with a two-year-old daughter, cranks out free code and lots of it - more free code than just about any individual in Australia.
His Webmin tool is the premier free-and-friendly administration tool for Linux and Linux-like operating systems.
"Like a lot of inventions, it came about through necessity rather than as part of a conscious plan or business investment," Cameron says.
He released his first free product in 1994, a 3D LAN-enabled aerial combat game. Email sent from outside Australia, where his game was also downloaded and played, made a big impact on him. To start in open source, he says, just pick a niche that no one else has filled.
He says he eats while working on free products "by not making everything open source". "The best money can be earned by doing non-free software development, usually related to Webmin or other free software projects."
Pacific Internet is Cameron's main client but Webmin is just as important when pulling in the dollars. You're only as good as your next product release, he says, adding that any fame that accrues from Webmin's success lasts only as long as it stays up-to-date.
Cameron says he would vote for the political party that does the least to help the open source movement - he believes independent development of free software should be independent.
Embracing a new latitude
Who: Arjen Lentz
Best described as: MySQL AB Australian frontman
Living in: Kenmore, Brisbane
Notorious for: spreading the MySQL word
Best work: promoting MySQL in Australia
Current work: improving MySQL documentation, MozOO
Informed by: lots of practical experience.
Thinking about: lots of multi-dimensional ideas
Find him: mysql.org
Speak to Arjen Lentz and you catch a glimpse of those hectic software evangelism days of the 1990s. The 100-strong MySQL AB company, Swedish in origin, with most of its global staff working from home, has the brio and hubris of an Oracle or a Microsoft.
Lentz is a Dutchman wed to an Australian who relocated here for the space and the laid-back atmosphere.
He exudes the confidence of a profitable, growing company that knows what it's doing. And what it's doing is bustling other players, such as Oracle, out of the commodity database market.
That's the set of customers who need a straightforward relational database management system (RDBMS) that works, rather than one that's all-singing and all-dancing.
MySQL's database software is fully open source and free.
The catch is, you might need a consultant; relief from the onerous detail of an open source licence; or a warranty.
Whichever it is, pay MySQL and the problem is solved.
Lentz, 35, loves working for MySQL.
"Everybody in MySQL AB gets a lot of latitude, it's that kind of company," Lentz says.
Apart from his particular patch of MySQL, Lentz also offers the world an open-source distribution - a product package.
His side project, MozOO (www.MozOO.org), is a direct shot at Microsoft - it provides Open Office, Mozilla and related products on a single CD-ROM that installs on any Windows PC with minimal fuss.
Better, it is intended for ordinary users, not geeks. The CD is a free equivalent to Microsoft's flagship, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer.
Want to know more? Visit Open Source Industry Australia at osia.net.au