In the third part of this series we take a look at some of the open source projects that are the product of intense collaboration with various different implementation styles.
1. foobar2000
foobar2000 is the top choice of audiophiles. Developed as freeware, this audio player is both minimalistic and supports high fidelity music tracks. It also provides noise shaping and dithering for those who have the audio equipment to use it. The developer has released an extensive Software Developer Kit (SDK), allowing for a huge community of extensions to be added to the player, from album art and displays to different user interfaces. This is an interesting form of collaboration not by developers, but on the part of all the end-users, and this is a route that should be considered by all software companies that want to keep their code to themselves.
2. Second Life
This one shouldn't be new to you. Famous for having a do-whatever-you-can-script attitude, this online "world" is home to hundreds of luxury beach houses, ostentatious avatars, and other digital forms of glitz and glamour. However, the ability for scripting has also made Second Life an ideal testing ground for different academic experiments involving online worlds, and has contributed valuable research data. Collaboration is made much easier by exposing the world code through simple scripting, allowing research projects to be changed on the fly without restarting and recompiling, a feat that has proved valuable for an online world.
3. Nethack
Nethack is a single-player roguelike, the descendant of old terminal games like Rogue. Players explore floor after randomly generated floor of a huge dungeon, picking up items and fighting off monsters. What makes roguelikes interesting is the unpredictability of your dungeon run and in the vast library of items and creatures that can be generated. As you can imagine, being an open source project means there are continuous updates, leading to more and more types of items and enemies available. In addition, numerous forks from Nethack have been spawned, often having unique themes, from steampunk to sci-fi.
4. Android
Android, Google's attempt to develop a unified software platform for mobile devices, is anticipated to change the current practices of mobile development. Running on a modified Linux codebase, Google has made most of the software code available for perusal, allowing developers to utilize every aspect of still-to-be-released Android mobile phones. Writing applications for Android is said to be extremely easy, and having a unified software platform means applications will work across multiple types of mobile devices. Google hopes for this to be a true collaborative effort between hardware manufacturers, developers, and users, all working with each other to deploy applications that can have hardware changes if necessary.
5. Freemind
Freemind is an open source Java implementation of the mind-mapping school of visualization. People who utilize mind-mapping are against the use of strict hierarchical outlines to organize information, and prefer mind-mapping's more organic, freeflowing system. Mind-mapping consists of different nodes branching out, with the ability to reorganize and link together different branches on the fly. Freemind implements all these different conceptual aspects of mind-mapping, but its user interface is still not on par with those of professional mind-mapping software. The Freemind project is an example of varied collaboration, where people with all kinds of talents added their own expertise - writers for the manual, coders for the features, artists for the color design, and so forth.
