An Unintended Open Source Advocate
I never consider myself one to take up the torch for a particular cause. You won’t see me demonstrating infront of a government building or writing letters to my Senator. But lately I have noticed that I am championing the idea of open source to clients.
Over the years, I have used plenty of open source projects while developing websites. At first it was probably because I didn’t want to pay for MS Visual Studio. Then I didn’t want to pay for proprietery components. But I think what it really turned into was an issue of freedom.
With open source, I feel like I am in control of my project. If I want a feature that isn’t standard with a particular product, open source allows me to create that feature. I can pick and choose on the component and framework level. This lets me create the system that I WANT to use, not a system that is full of hacks to make things work the way I want.
There are tons of great projects with solid documentation and online support options. Just think of Apache, Tomcat and MySQL. These are all major players in the internet world and they are all open source. If you get stuck, just search around the internet to find your answer or you can even find places that offer paid support.
So am I an advocate? I guess so. The freedom of choice and extensibility is what I really love about open source.