Last month (on Cloudstock Eve, in fact) we released a whole set of Force.com Toolkits, just in time for Cloudstock and the Hackathon. If you've already dived in to the guides for getting started with the toolkits on Android, Azure, iOS, PHP or Ruby you'll have noticed that we are hosting the toolkit code at GitHub, under a BSD license.

What does this mean? Well, not only are you free to take the code, use it as is, modify it, even incorporate it into a shipping product, you can also, with the click of a mouse, fork any of the toolkit projects and work, in the open, on your own derivative version – 'social coding'.

This fact was brought home to me over the past few weeks as the first issue was filed on the toolkit for PHP, complete with patch. I noticed that the submitter had their own fork of the toolkit and was happily refactoring it to suit their purposes. It was a snap to test the patch, apply it, and close the issue – very satisfying!

While you could just use git to pull down the toolkit source code and work with it locally from then on, I encourage you to take the plunge, fork away, and see what you can come up with. Let a thousand flowers bloom!