In business I have been told many times that if you have a good idea and you wait a bit, someone else will run with it. Sometimes I have had the good idea (Linux Journal, for example) and did run with it. I even hope TUX is another one of those good ideas.

Today, I just helped prove the "someone else will run with it" part. What makes it interesting is that I was going to build some software to give away but someone else did the same. Thus, it clearly was just the "good idea" part and has nothing to do with profit. If this is too much suspense, take a look at Campcaster.

I moved to Nicaragua about three years ago. When I was first here I helped a local educational cooperative get some Linux classes started. Along the way we were talking about the need for educational radio broadcasts. My idea was to build a low-power FM broadcast station with enough brains that you could uplo
ad program files to it and schedule when they would be broadcast. My idea included a wireless link to upload the files and solar power but the complicated part was the scheduling software.

I wrote a prototype version of the software. It is based on a project called Karrigell which is a web framework. The system was working over two years ago but I never found the time to get all the pieces together and re-write an "idiot-proof" version of the software.

Enter Campcaster. It is equally free and goes way beyond what I had designed. Reading the manual I see something that rivals most if not all the commercial systems I know of. It clearly is feature-rich enough to be used for a commercial radio station. It even will "fit in" with a manual station just becoming an additional program source.

I haven't played with it yet but it clearly has convinced me to stop thinking that I will write my system someday. Open Source has already done what I need.