So several strands and thoughts are bugging my brain at the minute;
One of the themes from OSCON, which I haven’t had a chance to write about, is that the feeling is that open-source ‘has won’. This is a strange conclusion given, as I observed, that the vast majority of laptops were not running open-source operating systems. So what could they mean – well I think they were speaking of “the web”, “the infrastructure”, “the entreprise”. But not (yet) the desktop.
I’ll repeat again, David Stutz, “Useful software written above the level of the single device will command high margins for a long time to come.”. Let’s think about what high margins means for Gnome? Wouldn’t a ‘high margin’ for us be to somehow attract more Users and more Developers (both for core Gnome stuff and 3rd party app developers using the platform).
As Doc keeps reminding us we are always using metaphors to descibe things, and the favourite press metaphor is the sports / war story. So it is Microsoft v. Google. The “desktop” v. “the web”. Who / which will win. We don’t have to play that game – I say let’s make Peace not War. I’m not against P2P, but remember OSAF tried that with Chandler and couldn’t make it work. “The desktop”, “the web”, and P2P all work well in different, also in some overlapping, areas – let’s make them all work together.
Software above the level of one device – that’s all well and good for the likes of Microsoft or Apple which can either heavily influence or directly control more than one device. We’re still struggling to get Linux working on the world of laptops let alone try to tackle a world of other devices. But what about that world where we do have some influence – web development world, a world that open source has already won (if we believe the hype – and mostly I do).
I’m only about a quarter through the book so I may not have a full understanding – but I did read the Wired article way back and that’s all that counts right? – but I’m going to contend that open-source is enabling a whole long tail of software development and services. It’s easy to see the two extremes of super large companies with huge server farms like Google, Yahoo/Flickr, etc, and the totally decentralised p2p possibilities at the other end – but I think there’s a huge economy of little guys inbetween.
It’s something we’re finding at OpenAdvantage – lot’s of small companies providing lot’s of niche and custom systems built using open-source components. Some use just the big building blocks like PHP and MySQL, a few are starting to use the frameworks such as Rails, Django, or Propel, and others are using more dedicated solutions such as Joomla, Drupal, etc. At the bigger end, but not close to as big as Google, et al, are companies such as Wordpress.com, SugarCRM, or Alfresco, which can provide the hosting for you but also offer the freedom to leave, host via 3rd party / yourself option.
I would suggest that one way to get to 10×10 would be to try and leverage the success of open-source web technologies. We need to find ways of working with web building blocks, web frameworks, web solutions, to provide something that is better than just a web app or just a desktop app. Almost to a man every single company that we’ve seen get into open-source web technology, has at some point at least asked the question “I wonder if we can / should switch to a Linux desktop?” A demo of Eclipse + Subversion + Trac, even with limited and simple integration, really makes people’s eyes light up.
It’s worth noting that the recent famous “switchers”, Pilgrim, Doctorow, and Bray, are all “web natives” who all have an affinity for open-source, yet conciously or unconciously were willing to compromise and use OS X. I think there’s fertile ground here to make Linux the web native OS of choice.
(# :: posted Aug 16, 09:59 am in Open Source :: )
Yeah, consensus is to “integrate gnome with the web”. The question is HOW to integrate. The problem is that web apps are (unsurprisingly) built for cross-platform-ness so it’s not always easy to “add value” or “integration” because of the way browsers are sandboxing things.
Build a gnome-backed social network? Maybe, but gnome backing might be hindering adoption once community boundaries are hit.
Support existing web-apps like flickr or google mail by seamlessly integrating them with the desktop? Hmm, might not be popular for many “Freeness” concerned people (and rightfully so).
FWIW, an interesting combination of OSS software plus online service is emerging at http://collaborate.abisource.com . Anyways, groundbreaking ideas will be worth the buck, as always.
— Rob Aug 16, 11:15 am #
There are many great ways that a desktop could integrate with the web – I’ll get round to posting some of my ideas later, although they’ll almost certainly be the simplest and least interesting.
I think we should integrate with Flickr, however why not also Gallery, or other OSS galleries – how about working with them add a Flickr API (if that is reasonable) or some single API (Atom?) for posting to and getting images from a web gallery.
In my mind there is nothing wrong with integrating with big web services or adopting P2P more widely but that there is a big space inbetween for integrating with OSS web tech, that could be self hosted, a built in addon from an isp (like IMAP or PHP or MySQL is right now), or a specialist service (like Wordpress.com).
— Paul Cooper Aug 16, 01:47 pm #