So I make a decent living working for an Internet company in the Business Intelligence department. However, a side of me would like to create and market my own software one day. I get ideas for software but in the past, the task of building a prototype has seemed daunting. Lately, I've been picking up steam on my Nostalgia photo annotation idea by leap frogging on open source.

The idea is unique but there are common components in it's implementation. A few are: I need to read metadata off of digital camera pictures and I need to upload files to my ISP. I've solved these through open source classes I found by doing Google searches. Apache offers a great File Upload java class, Drew Noakes put out a metadata reader for pictures.

I think I'll go on building out ideas one at a time starting with this one. I have notebooks full of them. I'll go through the process of getting it into the open source community and docuent the process. In my next life, I'll leverage my business intelligence experience and teach a process of inventing neat little powerful web enabled information systems.

Once I get the process down, I can train willing young padawans (apprentices in Star Wars lingo) and as Pink and the Brain would say... Take over the world.

The only drawback is the liscensing restrictions. However, there's probably still a way to make money on the software you build. It's just not in the traditional way since you have to include other people's reusable code. I think Orfali and Harkey wrote a book on this years ago.