I found it interesting a few weeks back when Warren posted something about not wanting to use open source projects because of fear of legal retribution. I can kind of understand this when using anything distributed under the GPL license, and maybe LGPL if you figure you’re going to make lots of changes to the work, but lately a lot more stuff has appeared using some pretty lenient open source licenses (like the MIT and Apache licenses), and it’s pretty easy to get a pretty good understanding of what you’re allowed to do and what you shouldn’t do using a simple Wikipedia lookup. That said, WINAL, and if Warren’s lawyers are telling him to stay away, I can completely respect that.

I, however, have been interested in using and contributing to open source software for a while, and working at Orbus, I’ve actually had a chance to work on some (I gave myself permission). What I really like about open source is that if something doesn’t quite work the way you want, or if you want to add functionality, you usually can. Open source projects can be treated as black boxes, or they can be changed to your liking. Now, open source may not always be as stable as some off the shelf products, or have all of the same well rounded features, but sometimes that’s okay, because off the shelf products are sometimes ridiculously expensive, and I’m willing to take customizability and price point sometimes over a feature or two. Additionally, most open source projects are based of standards, not made up protocols and file formats, so you can usually find other tools that work with them (the same reason I use XML over many other text based data formats).

So, while using open source, I’m also contributing back to open source. I’ve made some changes to the STOMP clients, and I’ve started a new project for doing mDNS and DNS-SD over at Google code called Mahalo. I’m hoping that these will just be my first contributions to the open source community, and that both projects will be around (and used) for a while. That way, I can feel all good about contributing back to the community.