Sailing Solo Around the World Inspired Pioneer's Anti-Whining "Care Ware"

Now on the World Wide Web, he shares his globe-circling experiences and first-rate Web page editing software, with a reminder to Americans of just how well-off they are. Lutus' home page showcases the virtual sketchpad of a techno-Thoreau, with links to soaring in space, in the air, and at sea -- as well as to Web page creation software he wrote for himself and now offers to all as "care ware," on the condition that they take simple pleasure in the world around them.

"I realized that Americans are living in a total dream world of unreality when it comes to most people's daily existence," Lutus said in a telephone interview from his modest Spanish-style home in Ashland, Ore. "One time in Sri Lanka, I went to leave my garbage in the dumpster at the marina that served Americans and Europeans. There was a line of men from the village waiting for what we threw out. They re-used everything, including our plastic garbage bags. One of them was a man I played chess with, but I never heard him complain about his life. It made me think about how many people back home were causing themselves a lot of grief by whining all the time."

As an experiment in market economics and human incentives, he came up with a variation on shareware, the software distribution that relies on users sending money to a program's author. On his Web site, Lutus eloquently and jarringly elucidates The CareWare Idea, proposing a cashless transaction in consciousness for WebThing, his HTML editing program for Windows 95/NT computers (the first end-user application he's offered since Apple Writer):

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