Giant Open Source
By Al Williams
Sir Isaac Newton—the bane of many physics and calculus students—is famous for the statement, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Actually, Bernard of Chartres reportedly said something similar 300 years earlier, but Sir Newton evidently had a better press agent, so he gets the credit.
Two things make standing on giants easier today than ever. Open source software provides us with a wealth of ready-to-use code, and the Internet places all of that code just a few mouse-clicks away.
Unix denizens have known about standing on giants for years. The whole Unix philosophy is to build little software tinker toys you can snap together to make larger creations. In fact, I've seen entire database systems that use nothing fancier than a series of shell scripts.
Open source software (promoted by the Open Source Initiative, or OSI) is often incorrectly confused with free software (as championed by the Free Software Foundation). However, for my purposes, I use these terms to mean any software I can reuse in my own projects. You do have to be careful that what you do with the free software meets the licensing requirements—some free software doesn't let you modify the code or redistribute it. Other types don't let you sell products created using the code.
Increasingly, you can find important pieces of the Java development puzzle in some form of open or free software. I recently discovered some interesting Java packages—including one that provided regular expression support to one of my projects.
The Free Landscape
Searching for free source code is sometimes difficult with traditional search engines.
