Open Source delivers on promise to rising 3rd grader

I am proud to be a member of the open source community. I am especially proud when I can use open source to do something really unexpected, like getting my daughter all excited about doing something just a little bit batty, making a promise of success, and then, delivering on that promise, in spades.

Yes, my evenings and weekends this week were a wonderful chance to probe, yet again, the amazing depth and diversity that is the world of open source. And a wonderful opportunity to use open source to share with my daughter, yet again, a deeper understanding of the amazing diversity of the world in which we live.

And for those of you who click through to the above blog postings, I’d like to give a special shout out to the R community. I sent out an email a little before 2AM central European time with a patch I created for the sound extension package. Before 10AM Eastern Daylight time, I’d received a response from Matthias Heymann, the package author, thanking me for my patch and looking forward to integrating it in the near future. That is precisely the kind of responsiveness that explains why open source software is the innovation model of choice for a GNU generation. Hooray for the team!