Every so often one needs to take a slightly different path and see how the other half lives and works. That is what I did when I attended Access 2004, a Canadian library technology conference. I had heard good things about this conference, and adding to my interest was the preconference on Institutional Repositories that tied in with a project I was to address in my current job. On the same day as the preconference was something called a Hackfest, which, unfortunately I had to miss. Little did I realize how fascinating the Hackfest could be! At Hackfest a group of people get together and review a list of technology problems or needs have been submitted by libraries. The participants select a problem they want to work on and breakout into small groups where they spend the remainder of the day focusing on solutions. I was stunned at the end of the conference to hear the reports from Hackfest and see that several people had actually begun to code an Open Source Software (OSS) solution to their topic. Some groups estimated they were close to 25 percent done – in just a few days, while attending Access Conference sessions all day. Additionally, throughout this conference, I heard the names of other programs such as CUFTS/GODOT that had been developed and were in use in Canadian libraries, some of them outcomes of previous Hackfests. An article about the Hackfest is available online (http://wiki.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/LoomWareWiki:Hackfest). I was awed at what I saw and heard, and I wondered why I didn’t know what was going on in the libraries of our neighbors to the north. I was also fascinated that instead of griping about the problem or complaining about the vendor not delivering the ideal solutions, these librarians and programmers had set about solving the problem. This led to the idea that an issue of Library Hi Tech describing what is happening with OSS applications in universities and libraries (particularly Canadian institutions) was worth sharing. In addition to developments in Canada, we also have examples from the USA and one from New Zealand. There is a wealth of information on OSS applications in libraries and in other settings so I will only cover that briefly. The actual beginning of OSS is hard to define, but it is at least 20 years old (Cervone, 2003). A key definition for OSS is access to the actual source code, often available under GNU Public License, which allows programmers to alter the software and redistribute it, with the requirement that they make these changes available to other developers. The licenses associated with OSS prevent commercial entities from making these products proprietary (available at: www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html). OSS is sometimes called “free” software but as one author explains, ““free” is used as in the phrase “free speech” (a right we covet), rather than the phrase “free beer” (always too good to be true) or “free kitten” (which