For years now I have had my “home projects” — programming projects that I would work on in my own time for my own benefit. I originally hoped to make money off some of these projects, but it never quite worked out that way. Occasionally, back in the days when I was a self-employed programmer / architect / consultant, I would be able to use something I had written earlier to help me to gain and to complete a contract (and in those cases I would always be careful to retain copyright on the parts that were mine). But it didn't turn out to be the money-spinner I had hoped, and I didn't become the Bill Gates of the Southern Hemisphere.

But as with many programmers, I would like my work to be seen as useful, even if I'm not making any money off it. The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement that has sprung up in recent years has allowed just this, and I am making several of my home projects available as Open Source Software in the hope that others will be able to derive some benefit from them.

I do not at this stage plan to make use of one of the main OSS servers like SourceForge — there are so many projects up there that it's easy for an individual contribution to get lost in the blizzard. Using my own site gives me more control over the presentation, and this site is indexed by all the major search engines. (To be honest, I'm not expecting a huge number of downloads anyway, regardless of the location.)

And I am not opening up my CVS server for access from outside my firewall. All software is available for HTTP download, but with no mechanism to allow contributions back to the repository. If you wish to propose modifications to any part of the software, or if you wish to contribute to (or comment on) the ongoing development of the software, please contact me by email — see the link at the top of this page.

The following projects are currently available for perusal or download; more may be added from time to time.

• ID3 Tag Utility
• Expression Language
• HTTP Server Bean
• XML Utilities
• Spring Utility
• JavaScript Files

All of my software is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). This is the least restrictive form of GNU License, and in particular, it does not demand that any system in which my software is used be itself made open source under a similar license.

This is a contentious issue — Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation, would prefer that all open source software be made available under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which includes the important restriction that any software which uses or incorporates the licensed software must also be made open source. I see this as an impediment to the usefulness of my software, and I do not plan to adopt such an extreme position myself.

But I'm open to argument, and it's possible that future projects may be licensed under licenses other than LGPL.

Software developers may also like to look at my Unicode / ASCII / HTML code table, which I find to be a useful reference page.