John MontGomery has some crazy ideas aobut what he calls “Open collaboration”, but what he is really talking about is community driven projects and open source.
While I have no problems with his 4 categories, his examples show an extreme lack of knowledge about the history of open source, the web, and unix.
Cloners, e.g. Linux
When developers see a feature or an application that looks interesting one of the avenues they explore is to copy as closely as possible the interesting thing (and typically to make the source code available).
True, although this discount the inovations that Cloners are allowed to pursuit because they aren’t squashed by management in some planning meeting, or by a senior developer who doesn’t understand some new technology.
My coworker points out that “if he means Linux the kernel, ok. But if he means Linux the experience, no way” and continues to site package management, command line experience and how it is different from traditional commercial unix.
Standards-Built, e.g. Apache
Apache was created by members of the IETF mostly as an implementation of the HTTP specification to verify that HTTP was, in fact, implementable and to create an implementation with which to test compatibility. There are many examples of this kind of cooperative development to create a reference implementation.
This is just a false representation of history. Apache was “a – patch – y” web server. It started as a set of popular patches for the NCSA httpd server which was the reference implementation. Keep in mind this was during the time of HTTP 0.9 and upcoming 1.0. There were no “web standards” organizations. The web was in its infancy. I don’t know how one could call this ‘Standards-Built’ other than following what everyone else was doing. The 1.0 RFC wasn’t published until 1996, Apache was started in 1995. See the details of How Apache Came To Be
Competitive Devaluation, e.g. Eclipse
Companies like Microsoft and Macromedia have some substantial advantages over IBM in the development tools area and IBM, despite many attempts and acquisitions, was never able to create a compelling-enough product to compete with these companies while still charging for its software. So it created a development tool shell and released it under an Open Source license and encouraged a community to grow around it, attempting to unify the development tools segment.
Have you heard of WebSphere? IIRC WebSphere server and tools are in the top two or three as far as commercial Java platforms go. Instead I would argue that Eclipse has failed to compete with WebSphere, JDeveloper or whatever Borland offers.
Invention, e.g. Perl
Not quite like anything that came before, though clearly anchored in a combination of a more powerful shell environment and the C programming language. There are lots of examples, though few as notable (and universal) as Perl.
Perl was far from new when it was new. It stemmed from awk. Now I’ll admit that perl5 and perl6 have very little in common from awk, but the roots are still shared. While perl is now used as a general purpose language, it still came from “Practical Extraction and Reporting Language”. It is very easy to suggest that had awk evolved and changed it would be much like perl would be today.
Meh. Standard Microsoft FUD. MS feeds it to their folks who know nothing about the background of what they are being feed, it gets filtered down telephone style(yes the childs game) and you get kids arguing on slashdot, or in their blogs, like me.
Oh shit, I’m a stupid internet arguing kiddie.
I particularly liked the way he came up with these four categories, and then castigated open collaboration products by complaining about the fact that sed and awk have different syntaxes. Which would be fine, but:
It’s completely irrelevant to open source; the original tools were proprietary software — the free versions are pretty much required to have a compatible syntax with the ones they replicate because, well, that’s what replicate means.
Both sed and awk are designed for different tasks so it’s not all that surprising that they have different syntaxes. And, where it’s important, they share syntax, no reinventing of regular expression syntax for instance (leave that to Larry Wall in Perl 6).
Ahem. Does this make me a ‘stupid internet arguing kiddie’?
the tool borland makes is called JBuilder. 🙂 when i saw his argument about IBM, i thought the same exact thing. good call.