Nothing aids in understanding better than application - learning “theory” doesn’t come close. In a previous post I wrote, theoretically, about how great Open Source is. This post shows the proof.

In the other post I pointed out that I had enabled a “share this” feature on this site to enable posting of Whatever’s Interesting posts to social news sites like Digg (regardless of past issues I’ve expressed concerning Digg). I casually pointed out that there were other options to the “Share This” plugin, written by Alex King, and I chose and linked to “Digg This Reloaded” by Ankur Kothari in specific.

Not ten hours after I posted, Ankur had written a comment to point out that DTR now actually includes Alex King’s plugin, while including more features - in specific an options page in the site admin and other nifty things that Share This lacked. Awesome, and so now Wi is running DTR.

And while this shows how Open Source can work toward a positive result technically, I think the real point to make here is something I neglected to mention the first time around. Open Source software is great from a technical perspective but the people behind Open Source are greater. The actual developer. in this instance, took the time to clarify a point on a random blog, advocating for his work. How many developers at Microsoft go home at the end of the day and try to set the world straight about random features of Windows?

Maybe some do, I don’t know, but the point is that there is real enthusiasm and love for software and community in Open Source. And that’s why Open Source will win in the end.