BriCode Thoughts from Brian Holt

My First Open Source Project Released… googlePop.

This week I released my first bit of open source code. It's an open source Hello World project to print Hello Worlds across the... world. No, I'm just kidding. It is a bit of code I wrote at work to pop up a window with a Google Map. It accepts latitude, longitude, and a string as parameters. The string is displayed on a blue banner on the bottom of the map. It's fairly simple code but I figured it could be useful to others. It is released under the MIT License meaning feel free to use, abuse, and mangle my code in any fashion you see fit for whatever project, commercial or otherwise. Feel free to ask me any questions you may have about it, but I think it is pretty straightforward. The code is written in HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript using the Google Maps V3 Javascript API. You can find it here on GitHub:

googlePop

If you do use it, it would be cool to know where it ends up. Leave it a comment or send an email to gpop at bricode period com. Happy coding.

Which brings me to my next point. A lot of people ask me how I feel about open source software. Most people when posing this question to me expect me to gush about how great it is like most other developers and are surprised when I am not so quick to do so. I think it is positively fantastic that people take their personal time to do it and I use many open source projects on a daily basis like Linux, GIMP, Eclipse, OpenOffice, MacPorts, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and the list goes on and on. In fact, my livelihood is based on being a LAMP stack developer: all open source stuff. Obviously I am appreciative of the efforts of others.

That being said, I firmly believe that man deserves to benefit from his labors. That is not to say by any means one cannot make money through open source software: you can. Certainly, millions and millions of dollars are made annually by companies with open source projects (see: Sun Microsystems/Oracle.)  But there is also a place for closed source projects. I simply cannot relate to those that believe that code should be open source. I believe that closed source projects drive competition and that competition drives innovation and lateral thinking. It comes down to in large part the argument does code reuse or competition promote innovation more and I favor the latter. Certainly there is merit to the opposing argument: if I ever need a module to do some particular task and I notice that cnn.com has a function like that, I could just go grab it. It saves time. But what if by making me redo and replicate his function I find a new way to optimize it by developing my own algorithm? I believe you lose too many opportunities by open sourcing everything.

Overall, I am satisfied with how things are now. Each has its place. I think we could work on software patents and how they work, but that is another story for another day. I am resolving to contribute more to the open source community so that others can reap the benefits I have. I need to stand on the shoulders of giants so others may do the same, so to speak.