[ Thanks to Kevin
Reichard for this link. ]
Why put the effort into creating and developing Open Source
software? It’s not for the personal glory–it’s because of the
great people in the Open Source community. Jason Fink details his
initial experiences coding Open Source software.
http://www.linuxprogramming.com/news/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-04-14-001-03-CD
“About a month ago I got what one might refer to as “the itch”–the
feeling that I needed a program (more specifically in this case, a
set of utilities) and I was unable to find them. So, being a geek
and all, I wrote them. They are extremely simple console-based
utilities that return vendor and hardware information about the
system processor and IDE hard drives on Linux systems. The utils
really are quite rudimentary; they venture into the proc filesystem
and get very specific information. Not exactly a challenge but as I
stated, it was an itch, I wanted the utils, had not found one that
did exactly what I wanted so I wrote some. This is the very essence
of the beginnings of a bazaar-style programming project.”
“Initially I did not intend on even submitting the programs to
the wider world since they were so specific. Nevertheless, I was
encouraged by some friends who said: “There is a chance if you need
them, so does someone else.””
“The final result being somewhat of a guilt trip being laid on
me for not sharing. So I packaged the utils and uploaded them
to metalab. I am glad I did; not because it made me famous or
anything (believe me, these particular tools are not exactly
ground-breaking work) but I got first-hand experience at how
the Open Source model really works with tiny projects.”