Jason Austin's Blog Life and times of a PHP Developer in Raleigh, NC

Open Source in Higher Ed – Give a Penny, Take a Penny

I love open source software.  The sharing, the collaboration, the community around it.  For those that know me, you know that is right down my alley.  Working in higher education at NC State, there are many services that I know would not be possible without our access to open source software.  Our campus homepage uses jQuery, we are a huge PHP shop, and MySQL provides database services for a lot of apps on campus.  But open source is more about consuming, it's about contributing back.

I know you have all seen those little "Give a penny, take a penny" trays at convenience stores.  There are a few pennies in there, and if you need one, you take it.  But there is also an inference that if you have an extra penny, you should throw it in for someone else.  Open source software is not really any different.  I can't count how many open source solutions I have implemented, and without those solutions, I would have wasted valuable time and energy recreating something that was already done.  Why not provide the code that I write for some other poor soul out there trying to solve the same problem?  In my mind, that is just common decency, especially when my time is paid for by the tax payers of the State of North Carolina.  If you work in public service and DON'T share your code, I may just call you selfish.

People really and truly appreciate the sharing of your code.  As a perfect example, we have open sourced the code we created for the http://twitter.ncsu.edu site, making it free to download, implement, change, whatever.  A few weeks after we released the code, I probably had messages from 5-7 other Universities who had downloaded the code and had plans to implement their own twitter site.  Today, I got a message from one of those people that I had been helping over the past few months stating that they got their site up and going!  Check out http://twitter.vanderbilt.edu!  Then I also got this nice tweet from them:

I'm not saying that Vanderbilt couldn't have created this on their own.  I'm sure they could have, but I'm sure they have better things to do than "re-invent the wheel".  Now Vanderbilt's faculty, staff and students can benefit from the same code as NC State's, and that is a very powerful and meaningful thing.

Call this a plea.  Call it a "call to action".  But the fact is, if we are creating software at a public institution, we should be open sourcing it, no matter how big or small the codebase is.  If you are creating software, realize the difference you can make for other developers by making your work freely available.  Not only will it make you feel better, but it will probably make your code better because you won't want other people to see how you hacked some junk together.

The next time you download WordPress, or Drupal, or jQuery, or Linux, or Firefox, ask yourself what you have given back to the open source community.