Open source story

It's not because I feel bad about taking and not giving back - for me it's primarily about efficiency.

I don't like reinventing the wheel and I like the fact that the Open Source model allows you to reuse others work, and they can reuse your work. Whereas in the the proprietary (capitalist) model I've seen huge inefficiencies of the same code being rewritten because the code is not available to use (for licensing or other reasons).

To this end when I needed a simple LDAP address book management tool for a client a couple of years back I had a look on the web and the only one's I could find were some unmaintained applications that didn't work.

So I convinced the client to let me write the code (at a reduced rate) on the understanding that I would release the code open source. One of the reasons I used was that if we got other people using it then they may add improvements and it would be a win-win situation.

This I duly did and Contact 0.1 was released on 24th April 2005. Exactly 2 months later I released Contact 0.2. At this point the application did pretty much everything that the client needed and some more on top.

Over the next 18 months or so I received the odd email from different places including Philadelphia and Western Australia from people who were using the application. I included a couple of minor changes but not much more.

Then recently I was contacted by another open source developer (Christian Boulanger) who had been using it and wished to contribute to it but thought that it could do with being put into the cakePHP framework. I agreed but didn't have the time to work on it.

A couple of weeks later Christian sent me a copy of my code ported to cakePHP. This reignited my interest and has set up Contact to be significantly improved.

I've set up a new Subversion repository for it - as well as a Trac Project to make it easier for us to collaborate and for others to see progress.

So all in all I'm delighted that my project is useful to other people and happy the code will live beyond it's initial life expectancy of a single piece of custom code.

Here's looking forward to Contact 0.5

Cheers, Mark