I’m a long-term fan of Open-source Software, while it’s not suitable for all software dev as there is sometimes a need for closed commercial software, it really can be useful in so many ways

I have been using a project called QLC+ for the last 5+ years as my lighting desk for Deevstock and have found it ideal for my needs, both in terms of feature set, but also given Deevstock is a not for profit event, paying for a lighting desk hire with the multiple universe support, control from my mobile etc would take a large part of the entire lighting budget. What we have been able to do however is make a financial donation to the author.

While getting ready for this year’s festival I came across a detail as to how the functions wizard feature works that were causing issues for me as I was trying to do simultaneous development of both my own lighting fixtures and also building the Virtual Console to control them. As QLC+ is not only free but open source, I was able to crack open the source, find the bit that I wished to change, create my only build right there with the new behaviour and create a pull request back to QLC+ to give back to the project