Lee Jordan
Web and media production scince 1997

Zen of free software

So during the development of this site I was able to draw on a vast base of code which could add new things to my site, which simply couldn’t have existed if the system I was using was locked down and the innards kept secret. There are bits of code and the like known as plugins for the framework my site is built on and they give you extra features.

I used a plugin called “custom anti spam” written by a guy called Peter (link to the plugin site here). It worked great on my development machine but as soon as I uploaded to my live site, the plugin broke, my host didn’t support the features that the plugin needed. I had the code so I tinkered with it and added a work around using a function which was only basic and was less fancy than the newer function, but it fixed the problem. I then thought about blind people trying to use this feature so while I was there I also added an idea to make it so that blind people could hear an audio description of what was being displayed on screen. You can see the results by dropping into a comments page.

I dropped onto Peter’s site and other people were having the same problem as me, so in the spirit of things I gave my changes back. Yesterday I sent Peter the code and today he has released a new version with my changes and linked to my site. This is what we mean by free software and by that we don’t mean as is money we mean as in freedom. I can fix a problem I see and give it back, Peter gets a new release and all those people trying to solve the problem now can just go get the new version, also if I kept my changes to myself, when Peter gets a new version out I’d have to redo that work because only I would have known about the change. Smart people do open source!

I love free software, don’t you?

Filed under: Code |