I’m doing a small experiment in open source distribution.
I have a site, toolbot.com, which formerly was a collection of miscellaneous PHP scripts that I had assembled over the years for specific tasks – package tracking, dummy text generation, link shortening, etc. Those tools are now offline. The original cause of their disappearance was a MySQL failure, but that really just provided an opportunity for me to make a break with that pile of old code.
From a post at Rogue Amoeba:
Funny, it reads more like a list of demands! I’m +1 on it all though.
I bought a new Netgear wifi router for the house today, to replace a crappy old D-Link that didn’t really work with either my MacBook Pro or my new iPod touch.
A business-card-sized slip of paper fell out of the box when I opened it. It was a little GPL/LGPL notice, with a URL for downloading source. Digging further through the included paper I also found a three-panel insert with six-point type that has the full GPL text on one side and the full LGPL text on the other.
Most readers are probably familiar with the fact that companies or organizations sometimes post “bounties” for open source products, or features, that they would like to see developed. Implement the thing to their satisfaction, you get the bounty – and the community gets the code. Sweet.
A while back I started gathering references to these things, thinking I’d start a site that listed them, made connections between coders and sponsors, etc.
OSCON ends with a half-day that goes by all too quickly. Below are some notes from those final few hours.
During the Keynote segment Nat Torkington cracked everyone up with an omnidirectional roast he called Open Source Therapy. He described imaginary family therapy scenarios in which Mom and Pop are working out their problems with their various open-source-project kids. The only one I wrote down was about Python: “Mom and Pop wish Python would get drunk, get laid, and lighten the fuck up!”