I’m certainly not the first to write about now being a good time to be in the business of doing things on the web, here’s the 37 Signals take on it. There are a bunch of reasons this is true, but here’s one that I’ve found really relevant: open source software rocks!

Perhaps I should expand on that a little. As a one man web development/consulting shop I have a finite amount of time in a given week to get things done. The availability of good quality software components that are free and freely customisable is a huge bonus when I’m trying to make the most of my time, which is why I love open source.

Right now I’m developing a site for a non-profit who are working with Cisco to provide technology for post-Katrina redevelopment of schools on the Gulf Coast. The site spec called for forum and photo gallery systems. Now I could have written them from scratch, but it would have taken me a long time, or I could have bought them off the shelf, but likely the products would have cost a lot or just not been quite right. Open source to the rescue, after a little searching I found projects that provided exactly what I needed, and because they’re open source I can tweak the code to get them working exactly the way I want.

This is great, I don’t want to spend my time re-inventing the wheel in developing what’s already been done, I want to create great stuff on the web. So I can concentrate on the stuff I really love doing because there’s a huge number of great tools out there that I can plug together and alter as I need to. And the price tag of zero dollars (plus the occasional donation to the projects) can’t be beat either.