Living the GNU dream, in a very small way

(Heavy geek-out warning - normal service will resume shortly)

My personal contribution to the world of Free software is largely limited to a fairly long shell script (multiburn) and a very simple HTTP server (jamserve), but it's nice to know that out there somewhere, someone is using and modifying my software to fit their own agenda. I've been in email contact with a few multiburn users (from various corners of the world, might I add) to work on new features, bugs, etc, but this is the first time I've found anything of mine living a life of its own.

I recently discovered that a German geezer by the name of Mathis is maintaining a fork of an old app I wrote. jmultiburn was a Java GUI for the multiburn script, originally written just for some Java and Swing practice, which was abandoned shortly after its inception due to changes in the way multiburn worked. Mathis's fork - jmultiburn-sermon - is very specific to his particular needs, but having tried it out it seems to work as advertised. I'm quite surprised by all this, as I didn't think anyone had even downloaded jmultiburn in the first place.

Coincidentally, a couple of days ago I threw together a new multiburn GUI; this time using Zenity. gmultiburn suggested itself as a name, for reasons to do with garden ornaments. Due to the limitations of zenity, it's very much 'workflow' based (i.e. you click through screens, selecting the options you want until it's done), but that's not too different to the way jmultiburn worked, so nothing of value was lost. There's a link to the gmultiburn script on the scripts page, but I may integrate it into multiburn if I get bored.