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Code Swarm - Way Cool

I have been interested in Open Source software development for quite a while, the process of how a project gets started, develops a package, and goes on to create ways to support the package to be fascinating.

Open Source is another way of saying FREE.  Surprisingly Open Source Software, while free, is often very high quality, as good as, or better, than packages you have to purchase.

If you use Commercial software and find that you need to add additional functionality to get the job before you done, you are pretty much out of luck.

Open Source packages on the other hand make the source code for the package available, and if you need to add new functionality you can either write the code yourself, or more frequently find a consultant who specializes in that particular package to add what you need.

Examples include all of the software I use, with the exception of the Microsoft stuff on my personal machine, to set up and operate ExReps is Open Source. 

We use a hosting service to mount the webpage on the Internet, and most of the software they use is open source, for example you are viewing this page via the Apache open source web sever installed on our hosting service. If you are using Firefox on your local machine to view it, you are using an open source package (Firefox).

Quality of Open Source software can vary, but at its best it is as good as, or better than the stuff that you have to pay for. Linux, which you may have heard of, is an operating system that runs your whole computer just like Windows or Apple runs those systems.

If you are interested in learning more you can check out the Wiki Entry or you can visit the Source Forge site to see most of the Open Source projects currently active.

Stone Soup Gangs

Open Source is free software, but it takes just as much work to develop it as the commercial product, Linux, Apache, Firefox, and other popular packages have tens of thousands of hours of development and test time behind them, just like the latest 500 dollar package from Microsoft. One of the more interesting things about Open Source development is that generally No One is in charge of a development project, nor is there a sales team getting the work out.  Instead a project around a package comes about when an individual or some individuals become interested in a particular need, start talking about it, and finally dive in and start doing it. Some people work 20 or 30 hours a week, on their own time,  for years on end on the stuff that interests them.

Do you think some of these folks need to get a life ?

These projects go on for years, some of them have been under active development for at least 20 years, as individuals for whatever reason have to drop out of a project, others start to participate and take up the slack. People tend to contribute what they are good at to the project, so the folks who are good at code develop the core, others who enjoy writing documentation do that, and of course some folks decide that there is some functionality missing that the just has to be included, so they run off and write an add-in or module for the main system.

Code Swarm, this is supposed to be about Code Swarm

Code Swarm is an Open Source tool by Michael Ogawa your can click here to visit the Code Swarm Site. In any software development project copious amount of written material comes to exist, the Documentation,  Even the Documentation gets documented, and usually every time a document is created or changed it is marked up with the date of creation or modification, and with the name of who created it or modified it.

The Code Swam package chews through all of this information and creates a movie of the life of the project, it shows all of the people who worked or are working on it what they did, and tracks when they did it, but it presents all of this information as something like a home movie, showing the birth and growth of a child.

Way cool, click on the images below and see how a package is born and grows

Apache

 
code_swarm - Apache from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

 
code_swarm - Python from Michael

 
code_swarm - PostgreSQL from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

 
code_swarm - Eclipse (short ver.) from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.