thoughts on using other peoples apps

screaming

Howdy everyone,

Ever since I programed my first quintessential '<?php echo "hello world" ?> I've been madly in love with PHP. Everything I do now is programmed in it and I'm always looking for new programs to mess around with.

By the looks of the PHP section of freshmeat, a lot of other people feel the same way. This got me thinking. If I were to build a new application, say a groupware product, What are your opinions on using other people's code and modifying it for your own application?

For example, is it generally better, or accepted for another term, to take a calender application, an email application, and say, a notebook application and piece them together for your own groupware product, or make them all up yourself?

One of the pros of building it yourself, of course, is that you have complete control from the beginning over how it looks and integrates with the rest of your product. The con, though a big one, is that it will take so much longer to do.

One of the pros of integrating other people's work is that you can get your whole application done sooner. While one of the cons is that you have less flexibility up front on where you want to take your own application.

I'm interested to hear some of the PHP community's thought on the subject...

/Steve
http://www.nkrm.org
spam@nkrm.org

taddis

Well at first the source code will have to be in the right license, take a look here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html.
If you think the code is good and it is released with the right license, use it (why invent the wheel again?).

Anon

Well, you say it all in your msg ;-)

I can just add, that to decide one way or another is not, IMHO, an absolute way ;

I mean, depending on much time you need
to curve other'ss applications to your own need
it can be less expensive to build it from scratch ; on the other hand, if you've just a few minor things to change to have what
you want, than it can be better to use
other's software.

At last, there's a decisive point : the
security ... using other people software
mean to rely on them for that precise
point ; how much trust do you have in
other's skills in that field ? How much
skills do YOU have in that field if
you want to do it yourself ?

Anon

personally I like writing it all myself, I'm only starting to learn PHP, but with anything, I like to learn how to do it myself and do it myself rather than using someone else's. For a couple reasons: 1. I have more control as you said and 2. You don't have to worry about giving credit and all that (I guess it sort of takes away from my ego when I give someone else credit) and along with that point comes the point Tobias made about worrying about licensing and all that.

Anon

If the code is copyrighted or patented you should respect the author's rights. Otherwise, I don't see any reason not to copy/modify at will.

Some copyrights (like the GPU "copyleft" mentioned in another response), allow you to copy and modify with some restrictions.

Anon

But I'm always looking to borrow functionality from wherever I can. After all, none of us wrote the date functions in the UNIX library, but we all use them often.

I usually end up writing my own code, for the most part, because I like to thoroughly document what I do. And since most programmers don't, then it often can take me as long to figure out what they have done as it does to just write it myself!

Beside, what do you do if you discover a bug in some rat's nested code you've leveraged? Now you are back to using your time again on deciphering what the other geek-speak programmer did. See what I mean?

Of course, this is all relative, as nobody in their right mind is going to sit down and write their own DBMS. I tried once and ended up grabbing a copy of MS Access.