Open Source (was Don't you just wish Rev would do this?)

[David Bovill]

It puts the user directly in contact with the development process. In terms
of open source software the user is (or has been) the developer - so you you
get stability, quick bug fixes and security (if you are dealing with
paranoid sys admins), or chaos, multiple forks and experiments (if you are
dealing with younger hackers). Thats how it cuts out the cause of feature
bloat by getting the marketing people out of the loop. Thats why the
packaging, GUI and ease of use tend to suffer.

What seems to be happening now (as Richard pointed out) is that the design
and usability people are getting in on the act. This could not happen until
the infrastructure was there now for open source style GUI work. MVC style
design patterns allow the geeks to adore each other, and the wannabe
designers to show their stuff without messing with the functional code.
Thats not just CSS and skins, but also businesses providing web services
such as mapping.

I'd beg to differ with Lynn that this stuff is only for the big boys - like
Adobe, IBM, Google or Yahoo. The developers of Base Camp have a good
business, they build upon the developer community they created with Ruby on
Rails. They get a lot of work. Nor did they need to raise heaps of cash to
get there. If I had a vote - I'd at least be seriously exploring moving over
to that sort of model - together with dual licensing for companies wanting
closed source solutions for their customers.

Business models are adapting to these new forces, and while they are not
sorted out yet - where there is dirt there is money.

On 07/06/07, Chipp Walters <chipp at chipp.com> wrote:
>
> On 6/6/07, Samuel M. Smith <smithsm at samuelsmith.org> wrote:
> >
> > The problem I have with runrev is not open source per se but that
> > with a paid model the incentive
> > is for the developer to release "feature" updates that sound good to
> > justify paying upgrade fees but
> > that for the most part are not nearly as valuable to a developer as
> > maintaining stable quality code.
> > Mature open source on the other hand has the opposite incentive,
> > stable code and only add features that
> > people are willing to invest time in to get so you get a different
> > evolution of features over time.
>
>
> Brilliant.
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