I have been a fan of open source software, specifically Linux for a long time now. Even when I earned my living through Windows, I loved playing around with Linux. Till recently I did not play with any open source applications and open source was becoming just a hobby. Some time back one of my colleagues showed me two products called Zope and Plone. I thought at first those are goofy names for products and didn't think much of it.

I was planning to launch my website for a long long time now. But I never had enough time, resources or skills to do it. I slowly developed it and then one day I launched my website. And guess what I am using? A part of LAMP architechture, Linux, Apache (front-ending Zope and Plone), Python and I am loving it.

Recently I started putting photos on the website. But the functionality was not good enough. Some products were broken (CMFPhotoAlbum and CMFPhoto) and some didn't work. But Plone 2.1.2 has builtin support for handling photos (more about that later), but it was not providing me with navigation links and when I chose different view method, it used to give me an error. I fought with it for two days without success, then I gave up and registered myself onto SourceForge.net and put in a request for help. I received replies almost instantaneously and I worked with Matt (I don't know his full name, but I suspect he is from New Zealand) and he pointed out that there was a bug in the system (Yes!! I found out a bug) and he suggested a fix which worked like a dream.

I will be soon submitting (like today) a bug report to the Plone development team and I hope to contribute to open source software movement as soon as I finish learning Python and plone programming. What amazed me was the speed and the quality of response I recieved from Matt and the overall open source community.

Ok granted that the open source products are not mature and may have many bugs, but the support that you get from the community is amazing. And this too from people who work in the spare time and do not stand to gain financially or otherwise. The entire thing took me less than 24 hours to resolve. I would be surprised if I get the same turn around time from proprietary vendors.