Organizing My Source

Since I returned from reboot in June, I’ve been praying in the church of open source. Partly this is because I think open source is cool, and reboot introduced me to some cool practitioners (of course there are some cool practitioners right upstairs too). And partly this is because distracting myself with open source fiddling is a procrastinator’s dream: why spend time on meeting deadlines for paying work when you can connect Plazes to your toaster instead!

Until now my open source experiments have existed in a ragtag collection of weblog posts and Rukapedia pages, with a combination of licensing that ranged from “none” to inappropriate use of Creative Commons licensing.

I took some time today to better organize my open source house; specifically:

• I’ve created a directory in the Rukapedia of all of the projects, with a page for each one. These pages are the new “homes” for the projects.
• I’ve modified all of the weblog posts related to these projects to point to these new homes (here’s an example).
• I’ve moved all of the source code into a Subversion repositories; this will allow for much better version control and distribution. If you’re new to Subversion, Version Control with Subversion is an excellent introduction.
• I’ve modified the license for all of the bits of code to the GNU General Public License. To do this I actually had to read the GPL for the first time; my how wonderful it is. I’ve still a little but of work to do to better document the GPLness of the code, but the basics are in place.