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A celebration of open source

In honor of this week's Open Source Bridge conference, as well as in recognition of the role that open source software has played in the development of our business, we're pleased to announce that today, June 16, 2009, Code Sorcery Workshop is offering any open source contributor a free license to Meerkat, our SSH tunnel management application. We are also giving away a $250 gift certificate to the legendary Powell's Books. Read on for the details.

If you'd like a free copy of Meerkat, just leave a comment on this post linking to an open source project that you've worked on with a brief mention of what you did. It could be coding, but doesn't have to be -- it could also be documentation, helping new users, anything that contributes to the common good of the project. We'll collect all the info and send each contributor a full, unrestricted license to Meerkat, a $19.95 USD value.

However, if you'd like to instead try for the $250 USD gift certificate to Powell's Books, a purchase of Meerkat will make you eligible for this drawing. Just register Meerkat today and you will automatically be entered for the drawing. The winner will be announced in a followup post.

In both cases, you must take action by midnight Pacific Daylight Time tonight to qualify.

Meerkat is an application that adds a lot of Mac-specific value to SSH, an open source tool that ships with every Mac (as OpenSSH). And Macs themselves are built on a ton of open source software such as Apache, Postfix, CUPS, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, sudo, unzip, zlib, and many others. You can read more about Apple's commitment to open source as well as open source releases pertaining to Mac OS X.

I began knowingly using open source software in the mid-90s and started contributing by releasing my own projects on freshmeat in late 1999. I've always looked for ways to contribute to open source projects when I can, whether it's by bug fixes, new feature patches, documentation, or just community help. Most recently, I've been involved with the Drupal content management system.

Open source is the lifeblood of the internet. So many of the tools that we take for granted everyday have been developed in this way, by generous folks giving their time for the greater good. I am extremely thankful for the many ways that open source has enabled me to teach myself a lot of what I know today about technology, to provide economical solutions for clients who need it, and to make software better and better by degrees.

So, here's to open source!

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iPhone application - Open source project

Great post. I would love to get a free copy of Merkat :-)

Here is the link the my iPhone open source project, I did all the coding, etc...

http://github.com/sync/iphone-real-estate-application/

What is it exactly ?

ozEstate MAKES IT EASY AND FUN TO FIND, MANAGE, AND VIEW AUSTRALIAN PROPERTY FOR SALE IN ONE INTUITIVE INTERFACE.

Regards

I've been the lead developer

I've been the lead developer of Ubercart since its inception and am currently pushing it ever onward toward a 2.0 release so we can get some exciting new stuff going. Over the years I've also contributed Drupal support, documentation, patches (finally got me a core patch : ), and other modules. I bought a Macbook last year before my trip to Drupalcon Szeged and was bummed that I no longer had PuTTY, my favorite WinXP SSH client. I'd love to give Meerkat a shot to see if it can function just as well. : )

I'll bite...

I'm the sole developer (barring a few user-submitted patches) of Jumpcut, which I believe is the longest-running open source clipboard manager for OS X. There are, of course, a host of similar projects, some closed-source and some open-source, many of them quite good, but Jumpcut is designed to work almost invisibly for people who work all day with text. It's honestly an irreplaceable part of my workflow at this point; I'd sooner switch text editors. (It was actually initially written at the behest of my wife, who was working on her dissertation. Coders aren't the only people who use text editors...)

Meerkat Goodness

What a great promotion and show of support for Open Source. Thank you.

I would love a copy of Meerkat. One open source project of mine that I would list is:

http://github.com/grempe/amazon-ec2/tree/master

I am the creator and maintainer of this project which provides a Ruby library for accessing, and managing Amazon EC2 instances. My contact info is at the bottom of the README.rdoc file if needed.

Cheers!

Glenn

Open Source prj

Great idea and oddly enough I'm not surprised at the amount of sole developer projects. My project is http://code.google.com/p/moolah/ . My first and only Cocoa application and it aims to be an easy but powerful personal finance manager aimed at Envelope Budgeting. I have no contributers yet and when I look back at my first code I'm not surprised. :) Still. It works well and saves me money so job done.

WordPress OpenID plugin

I did a bunch of the design and interface work on the WordPress OpenID plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/openid/

Oh, and the Diso Project (http://diso-project.org)? ;)

Freebies!

Sounds nice.
I'm a dev on the cocotron project (cocotron.org). The contributer page there says what I did.

Macfusion

I'm the founder and lead dev on macfusion, a mac GUI for Googles MacFUSE software. It let's you mount ssh/sftp and FTP servers. You can find it at macfusionapp.org

Michael Gorbach

Ok, that's it! Only the

Ok, that's it! Only the commenters above get a free license to Meerkat. Thanks for participating!

Hi, This is a very generous

Hi,
This is a very generous move! I'd love a copy of Meerkat. I've contributed to the Sage Math project

http://sagemath.org

which is a open source competitor to the likes of Mathematica, Maple and Matlab. I wrote a distributed computing framework called "dsage" for it.

My email is yqiang _at_ gmail.com

There are, of course, a host

There are, of course, a host of similar projects, some closed-source and some open-source, many of them quite good, but Jumpcut is designed to work almost invisibly for people who work all day with text. It's honestly an irreplaceable part of my workflow at this point; I'd sooner switch text editors...

Just wanted to say I finally

Just wanted to say I finally had a chance to use Meerkat when developing a payment gateway integration for a service that uses IP Address authentication to access the API server. Works like a charm! I don't know if I ever really understood SSH tunneling until now, and Meerkat makes it super simple to manage. : )

@Ryan: Fantastic! Glad it

@Ryan: Fantastic! Glad it came in handy :-)

AWOL - All Walks of Life non-profit in Savannah GA

We are overcoming many local issues simultaneously. Keeping PCs out of the landfills, but of even greater value, we are re-using machines in a very innovative way. By giving old PCs a completely new lease of life and then making them freely available to less fortunate people who need them, we are truly closing the gaping divide that exists between those with computers and computer skills and those without.

We are only employing operating systems and software that meet the Open Source Initiative (Linux Ubuntu, Open Office etc) and we are providing training; initially for the computer triage teams, and then for the recipients of the recycled computers, so that they know how to use them. We are even supporting our users with a lively, on-line forum. Above all, we are using at-risk young adults as the "roll your sleeves up" workforce!

We are training them in the operational procedures necessary to prepare these machines for adoption. This includes, cleaning, basic configuration, bringing them up to specification, the installation of the open source software and testing. We are also providing the students with a formal curriculum so as to prepare and equip them for real-world jobs. awolinc.org