To me open source is a lot more than just licensing under an Open Source license. It has more to do with making your product and its code accessible and to you collaborating.
Unlike Nick Wilson, the author of Performancing for Flock, I do think there is competition, but I agree with him that there is no conflict. I welcome the competition. Open source is about collaborative competition!
I mention accessibility because of the numerous times that I have tried to find out the open source solution that a particular site was using, or tried to explore a particular functionality of a larger project and encountered road blocks or silence. The landscape is changing with better tools, but it still does requires a lot of commitment from members of a product to be accessible.
Competition is a core aspect of our society, where as collaboration is often buried by our desires for self.
Collaborative competition has been a defining characteristic of living in the bay area for me. Since moving there — I am currently back in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia — every where I go I meet very friendly people with insights into the software problems I am interested in seeing solved, and often in their competitive solutions to the problems. My experience at a few superhappydevhouse parties exemplify this. SHDH is a monthly all night event focusing on software development and exchange of technical ideas. Here there are often developers of “competing” products freely discussing their approaches, problems and solutions.
So why have I written all of this. It definitely has nothing to do with Mozilla.{org,com}. This is mostly to remind myself, but also because sometimes, we, in the open source community, make a habit of attacking each other; possibly because we listen to each other. I got involved in open source in 1996 because I believe in a better, far more collaborative world. Only in 2005, have I got my first full time job working in open source. It would be extremely difficult for me to ever go back to working on proprietary solutions.
I am very invested in Flock’s success. Regardless of Flock’s success, open source being successful is crucial to me!
technorati tags: opensource, flock, performance
Dude, that success is just a matter of believing. It will come, of that there is no doubt.
How to get there, well, that’s contested, but you’re off to the right start!
Believing with passion, and dedication, work, and time.
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