‘The hippy in me says...’

I liked this post, made a few days ago at flexistentalist.org: “But the hippy in me says ‘What about open source? You need to give back to the development community!’ Then I find that they do give back. Instead of making their entire applications open source, they have released numerous ‘proof of concept’ applications that utilize the core functions of NetNewsWire, wrapped in a very simple application with an open source BSD license.”

My thinking is that every developer owes a lot to other developers. Developers are lucky that they get to be very generous—and they’re lucky these days that they have the Web, which makes generosity so easy.

So it’s kind of a karma thing, the hippie in me says. Pay back as much as you can. And there are tons of other developers who feel the same way.