I was pointed at an article about a report on Open Source adoption and use in the dutch government, which reminded me of an interview my co-authors and me gave to SearchEnterpriseLinux.com. Specifially, we were asked why organisations should use open source in preference to closed source software.
Many moons ago I needed a way of storing documents online, so they could be shared between users and easily accessed from many locations. Thus, Simple Document Management System was born. SDMS is a PHP based front-end to a MySQL database that allows users to upload and download files into and from virtual directories using only a web browser.
It was my second ever PHP project and I wrote it in (bad) php3, with only some informal C coding as experience. Needless to say the code was not great, it used globals and had SQL injection problems. Though I did fix these two particular issues, the code is still old and tired and I've not really maintained it for years. Bringing it up to date would probably involve more effort than just scrapping it and rewriting it from scratch.
I've been doing a lot of work with Drupal over the past year and I had been vaguely considering reimplementing SDMS as a Drupal module, thus removing the need for me to also maintain code to handle users, passwords, commenting and permissions.
As I got more familiar with some 3rd party Drupal modules, it struck me that it should be completely possible to implement a document management system similar to SDMS in Drupal. Without doing any coding whatsoever. Thus, SDDMS was born.
I spent far too much time this past week trying to find out why a Drupal was not assigning authenticated user permissions to users who clicked on the validation link they were emailed. Instead, it would simply remove the temporary unverified user permission.
It's supposed to do the latter, but then also follow it up with the former. It turns out the problem was a Drupal bug that was triggered by my MySQL setup.