One of the most famous stories of Linux advocate Eric S. Raymond is that hackers spontaneously pitched in and bought him a $1,000 iBook as a token of their esteem. While that story is amazing, it’s not unusual or uncommon — Raymond’s geeky gift is just one of the concrete examples of the remarkable philanthropy of the hacking community, which Raymond calls a “gift culture,” a society in which your reputation is made by what you give away rather than by what you keep.
One of the most famous stories of Linux advocate Eric S. Raymond is that hackers spontaneously pitched in and bought him a $1,000 iBook as a token of their esteem. While that story is amazing, it’s not unusual or uncommon — Raymond’s geeky gift is just one of the concrete examples of the remarkable philanthropy of the hacking community, which Raymond calls a “gift culture,” a society in which your reputation is made by what you give away rather than by what you keep.
This edition of Java Matters ends a remarkable year of Java programmer generosity. In 2003, this column described some truly great open source projects, including the Apache XML-RPC Web services platform; the Velocity template rendering engine; the Struts Web application framework; the JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL), and the XOM XML processing library. The first four projects came from the Apache Software Project, whose Jakarta team has released more than 20 high-quality Java projects; the fifth was released by Java and XML book author Elliotte Rusty Harold. These five projects — and many others like them — demonstrate that open source is rapidly becoming the first place Java programmers do look and should look for class libraries, useful code, and inspiration.
It’s impossible to write about the open source Java community without noticing the altruistic nature of its programmers. People give freely of their work, time, and talent. So, in the spirit of the holidays and of open source, this month’s Java…
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