It’s not been a secret that I’m a big fan of open source software, I would likely not be where I am today had I not started with projects like OpenBSD or FreeBSD way back when. While my passion for open source software and the “bazaar” method of developing software might not be shared by everybody at Slide, Inc, everybody can certainly get on board with the value of incorporating open source into our stack, which is almost entirely comprised of Python (and an assortment of other web technologies).

Along those lines, there’s been some amount of discussion about what we can or should open source from what we’ve developed at Slide, but we’ve not really pushed anything out into the ether as of yet. Today however, I think we finally put our foot in the door as far as contributing back to the open source community as a whole, we’re now on GitHub as “slideinc, yay! (coincidentally we have a slideinc twitter account too)

Currently the only project that’s come directly out of Slide, and shared via the slideinc GitHub account is PyVE, a Python Virtual Earth client that I hacked together recently to tinker with some Geocoding (released under a 3-clause BSD license). In the (hopefully) near future we’ll continue to open source some other components we’ve either created or extended internally.

If you’re not a GitHub user, you should definitely check GitHub out, it’s a pretty impressive site. If you are a GitHub user, or a Python developer, you should “follow” the slideinc user on GitHub to catch the cool stuff that we may or may not ever actually release ;)