Science & Tech Quote by Andy Hertzfeld

“I got bitten by the free software bug” is a deliberately casual metaphor for a serious conversion experience: not a strategic pivot or a résumé move, but an infection. Hertzfeld frames his shift as something that happened to him, which is telling for an inventor long associated with proprietary, sealed-box elegance. The phrasing softens what could be read as apostasy from the classic Apple-era worldview. He’s not rejecting his past; he’s admitting a new kind of fascination he can’t shake.

The timestamp matters. February 1998 is when Netscape’s Mozilla announcement made open source feel less like a subculture and more like a plausible future. Hertzfeld isn’t invoking an abstract moral argument about software freedom; he’s marking the moment when an industry signal flipped. Mozilla turned “free software” from idealism into infrastructure: a big-name company conceding that the fastest path forward might require letting go.

There’s also a neat bit of engineer humor in calling it a “bug.” In programming, bugs are defects; in culture, “catching a bug” is enthusiasm. He fuses the two, hinting that the very thing engineers are trained to eradicate can also describe the irresistible pull of a better idea. Subtext: openness spreads the way good tools do - person to person, project to project - until it becomes less a stance than a default. Hertzfeld’s line documents that contagion at the exact moment it went mainstream.