The best kind of open source is GoogleSource (yes, I'm trying to coin a term, I'm afraid, though someone's probably beaten me to it). What kind of source is that? Simply what you get when you say, "Now how the heck am I going to do that?" and you point Moz to groups.google.com and start searching away.

More than once I've found exactly what I needed, already written out for me, ready for the cut & paste. In my latest VB project (almost to the point the exe is half a floppy in size! Not that impressive, necessarily, but pretty big considering we threw out XML), I must have 3 or 4 comments that have groups.google in the comments citing the source of the source.

Found a really basic syntax highlighting routine, how to use that crazy directory selection tool using WinAPIs, how to autosize MS FlexGrids, and how to clear a treeview with an API call.

Overall, not too shabby at all.

Goodness knows, I hope everyone who submitted these bits of code realized they were putting it into the public domain. Did I say I used the code, copy & paste? I meant to say I'd learned from the code. Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket.

Anyhow, that's some open source for ya, and one heck of an example of how the Net has made programming much much easier.