Thanks to Amos Shapira for this link.
“Rich’s recent experience with a Perl hack has him singing the
praises of open source.”
“Because the software was open source, I was able to examine and
modify it. The Internet allowed us to exchange information over
long distances with negligible effort. The use of scripting
languages meant the code was small and abstract, greatly easing the
conversion effort.”
This article has the author describing his experiences with
developing applications with free development tools, and is
incredibly positive. -lt ed