Statements to the effect that “open source software is unreliable” are disingenuous. With 120,000 software projects on SourceForge, it is pretty silly to make any generalizations about open source quality. One might just as well say that “all proprietary software is reliable,” although experience easily dismisses any such misconception. The reality is that most software (open source as well as proprietary) is of insufficiently high quality from the enduser’s perspective, and the current brouhaha is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
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I had the opportunity to keynote at the New Industry Leaders Summit (NILS) in Japan last Thursday. In a follow-up panel on open source, an audience member asked one of the better questions I’ve heard recently: “If open source, Software as a Service (SaaS), and Web 2.0 technologies are driving down the total cost of ownership (TCO) of software as you say, won’t that cause our industry to shrink?” I’d heard a similar refrain before: When we at Zimbra made the decision to go open source, some of my old-school buddies felt we might ultimately be taking food from their progeny’s plates.
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So the OpenAjax Alliance had its first face-to-face summit this week in San Francisco. Up until now, IBM’s tireless shuttle diplomacy has been the primary mover, but no doubt it’s going to get tougher to herd the cats with them all in one room :-). As someone who had the good fortune to be there when the initial OpenAjax seeds were planted, it is exciting to see the uptake of these efforts by so many talented companies. While I think it inappropriate for me to provide any color commentary on the meeting discussions (watch Dion and the crew at www.ajaxian.com for that), I do feel comfortable sharing the somewhat controversial (?) charge that Zimbra gave to the OpenAjax group:
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Time for another REST update. We’ll talk about updating content via REST urls, as well as a new formater.
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The Web is a massive, globally accessible and ever growing information repository. Just about any information you can think of can be discovered and retrieved via the Web. Until recently much of this content has been accessible through web sites and web applications that tightly coupled application data, business logic (a.k.a. services), and presentation into HTML pages. Since there were no external interfaces with which to access the information, the only way for third parties to get at the underlying services/data was to “screen scrape” HTML pages in order to extract salient content - a very fragile and time consuming task. This was the world of Web 1.0.
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