Open Source Potluck
By Randal L. Schwartz
The open-source movement has been going strong for quite some time, since long before the term had even been coined. In fact, some have argued that Perl and GNU Emacs are the canonical early success stories for open source, having helped spearhead the notion that a community of network-connected people can contribute to a publicly available tool to make it suitable for use in mission-critical commercial applications.
If you weren't overloaded by the buzzwords in that last sentence, read on:
One of the cool things about the open source movement is the user community's willingness to give back. Most people see open-source projects as potluck picnics. In a potluck, everyone brings a dish, usually something they most enjoy making (or, in my case, buying at the store pre-made, like chips), and we make a complete meal from the individual contributions. This works unless there are a bunch of geeks involved, in which case everyone brings chips and nothing else. That's why geeks usually have potlucks with software instead.
The advantage with a potluck is that I can leverage my contribution to the meal. I can bring one easy thing, and I end up with a bit of this, a bit of that, and a more-or-less balanced meal, including the three different desserts.
Similarly, with a software potluck, the few lines of code I bring can result in a complete program, by combining them with copies of the code in the libraries that others have brought, either in the distribution, or in the wonderful Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) at search.cpan.org.
