Setting Old Projects Free

I've been pushing my source code to the web since I started pulling together game mods and apps I thought others could learn from or use. About a year ago I got together with a bunch of guys and hacked on a bunch of webapps with lofty ideas of starting a startup. One year on, only two apps are still ticking along (spicyelephant and 5st), the rest are defunct and have been rotting in private SVN repositories. What better way to do a final justice to the hard work we put in than by and give something back - by open sourcing the projects.

Over the last few days I've pushed three of the mayhem method projects to my github account. Like a free garage sale, have a browse below - maybe there is something you will find useful.

Screen Sponge
Screen Sponge is a movie management web site where you manage all the movies and television shows you have, want, and have seen. Screen Sponge provides an online community, connecting your broader circle of friends to trade shows they have that you want, write reviews, and discus the shows you love.

Comment Is King
"...the conversation has left the blogsphere", meaning that increasingly the conversations regarding online content are occurring offsite. Comment is King is an online tool for blog authors and other content producers for finding and participating in the broader conversations around their content from disparate services such as Reddit, Digg, Delicious, FriendFeed, and Twitter.

gantDB

gnatDB is a lightweight personal data tracking service that encourages users to record everything and add meaning to collected data at some later date. gnatDB collects daily data points (data, context, and tags), for example: 10 pushups, exercise, arms and 5.50 hamburger, food, purchase, junk.

I have also pushed some of my other personal project from the start of last year, as follows:

Human TSP Solver
The humanTSPsolver site was built to investigate the question: Can human spatial intelligence be harnessed to solve instances of the Travelling Salesman Problem? The approach taken involved: (1) partitioning TSP instances into sub-problems, (2) allowing users to make contributions in the context of the sub-problems, and (3) aggregating the contributions into a holistic solution. Note: a database dump of one years worth of user contributions is included in this project!

Thick Profile
Thick Profile is an experiment into the preparation and exploitation of a deep digital profile of an online user. The approach involved constructing a model of a user based on the users specification of written contributions such as websites, technical reports, research papers, and blog posts. The development effort involved the preparation of code to parse such data sources, construct a model, and visualizing that model as a graph or tag cloud.

I decided to release all code under the less-restrictive MIT License, especially after the issues I had with companies wanting to exploit some of my other projects on sourceforge released under GPL and now LGPL.

I am a big fan of github. It is slick, simple, and unlike google code that also fits this bill, it uses git! I expect to use github for small-public work going forward. Like hacking with Ruby, it is a pleasure to use.