OUTSIDE of very nerdy circles, it went largely unnoticed that a war for the future of humanity was waged in the late 1990s.

Microsoft, rampant on the desktop and in personal software, was making a play to run the internet’s servers and if they’d locked the whole stack up they would have been able to exclude new entrants to the internet.

Ranged against the richest man in the world was a rag-tag collection of deeply nerdy coders. Linus Torvalds, of Finland, was the most famous of them, but Canberrans such as Andrew Tridgell, Michael Still and Bob Edwards will have speaking parts if the movie is ever made.

The rebel alliance in this one came out victorious because they made powerful and flexible software very well – and gave it away for free.

They were inspired by the philosophies and lifetime struggle of an American called Richard Stallman, who has an amazing knack for saying things no-one is happy about but are completely right. In essence, a  biblical prophet for our times – and he looks the part.

In the great war with Microsoft the free Apache web server software proved to be decisive. Free, efficient, comparatively secure and, importantly, built to let its users modify and extend it as they chose, Apache triumphed over IIS, made by the biggest company in the world at the time.

Microsoft failed in its bid to own the internet, Bill Gates moved on to trying to make the world a better place, and the company was forced to start making good software rather than innovating in sharp business practice.

Which brings us to a problem we have today.

Free stuff on the internet isn’t what it used it be.

Even back in the ‘90s and early ‘00s the free-software greybeards would intone “free as in freedom, not free as in beer”.

Last week a friend asked me if I wanted an invite to the new contender in social media networks. I thought about it.

I said: “I’m not comfortable any more giving my personal data to an organisation I don’t understand the business plan for.”

I hit this wall with free smartphone games a couple of years ago. When the iPhone first arrived there were some cracking free games made by enthusiasts for the love of it, like so many of the best things in life.

But then the bright sparks moved in and soon there were ads. Ads seemed a reasonable price to pay for a fun game. Then we had paying a couple of dollars for better in-game equipment. Reasonable if one likes the game, surely?

And then “Candy Crush Saga” came out. An exercise in pure mathematics charted against the weak points of the human mind it sucked in millions and convinced them to spend hundreds of dollars to get to the next level.

It got me to spend more money than I could afford, it got my girlfriend and dozens of others I knew. One morning I realised that if the best thing anyone had to say at my funeral was I’d made level 300 in “Candy Crush” it wouldn’t have been much of a life.

These days I like paying for things. It’s a much simpler transaction. You make something good, I pay money for it, I enjoy the quality of your work.

Which does get me wondering about my relationship with Google.