Public source code repositories, from Sourceforge to GitHub, from the Linux Kernel Archives to ReactOS.org, from PHP Packagist to the Python Package Index, better known as , are a fantastic source (sorry!) of free operating systems, applications, programming libraries, and developers’ toolkits that have done computer science and software engineering a world of good. Most software projects need “helper” code that isn’t a fundamental part of the problem that the project itself is trying to solve, such as utility functions for writing to the system log, producing colourful output, uploading status reports to a web service, creating backup archives of old data, and so on.

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