But more than being a mere coder-god, Bricklin is a man with his heart in the right place. He did not attempt to "patent" the idea of a spreadsheet, and for that deserves our eternal thanks. Continuing this fine tradition of altruism, his latest program goes even further, and is being released under the GNU GPLv2. It's called wikiCalc: it combines the best of Bricklin's past with today's increasingly trendy wikis.
As its home page at Software Garden explains:
The wikiCalc program lets you make web pages with more than just paragraphs of prose. It combines the ease of authoring and multi-person editing of a wiki with the familiar visual formatting and calculating metaphor of a spreadsheet. Written in Perl and released under the GPL 2.0 license, it can easily be setup to run on almost any server as a web application or on a personal computer to publish by FTP.
There's also a fuller explanation, as well as the code itself. Whether you do it out of a sense of historical piety, or because you want to play with tomorrow's cool - and open - toys, it's really worth taking a look at.