Foreword
When I first corresponded with Nicole, she was a recent library school graduate working at a law library in Philadelphia. She was already aware of the technical merits of free software (as in freedom) and open source software (FOSS) and had redesigned and built the intranet at her work with FOSS tools. What she was only just learning about was the philosophy behind free software. A functioning free and open source software project is about far more than the program code alone; it is as much about freedom and community as it is about software.
The Free Software project I work on – Koha (http://koha-community.org), which is an integrated library system – is a good illustration of this community in effect. The fact that a programmer in ...
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