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Achieving Vendor Lock-In Through Open Source

Posted on by John

There seems to be a renewed interest from proprietary software vendors in the use open source to create vendor lock in.

This week, add Microsoft’s Silverlight 1.1 and Dynamic Languages Runtime to the mix alongside Adobe’s Flex SDK.

Jeff Gould argues that open source has “jumped the shark,” and that:

the magical words “open source” have come to function as the software equivalent of carbon offsets. . . . some software vendors are cleverer than others, and have learned to buy indulgences for their sinful profit-craving ways by selectively building open source components into their stack. . . . Their own software remains every bit as proprietary as the Microsoft products they compete with.

Interestingly, his argument comes the same day that Microsoft announces the Dynamic Language Runtime at MIX 07.

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Slingshot – lightweight apollo?

Posted on by John

Slingshot

Today Joyent announced the public release of Slingshot, a framework for (their words) obliterating the distinction between the web and the desktop.

Slingshot lets developers take Ruby-on-Rails applications and deploy them to desktops (Windows, Mac OS X).

Is it just me, or does the red rock in the slingshot graphic look a bit like the Adobe Apollo logo? Ok, so maybe not a direct version of the logo, but certain the Adobe Apollo red.

Is this a cheaper faster way to get to sent to the moon and back, or just another David vs. Goliath myth?

More on Slingshot, including a quick tour.

The Real Trouble With Twitter – There’s no There, There

Posted on by John

Megaphones
(Image from Darren Greaves (Boncey) via Creative Commons license)

I’ve been thinking a lot about – and playing around with – Twitter. These Dylan lyrics came to on the plane this morning, as an apt description of why I’ve had a hard time “getting” the value of Twitter:

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
. . .
Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’,
. . .
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

No, I’m not suggesting that Twitter is an omen of some rapidly upcoming flood. It’s the middle line there I’m thinking of.

Annalee Newitz writes in “The Trouble with Twitter” that:

Twitter’s popularity reflects the accelerating pace in cities: people use Twitter as they stroll around with mobiles, and the rapidity of their updates reflects a sense that new, exciting things are happening to them every minute, not just every few hours (blog time) or every day (newspaper time).

But the problem I have with Twitter isn’t that it is too fast, and thus discourages reflective thought, or that the messages are too short, and thus discourage contemplative rhetoric. Those things are true, but not the problem. (They’re equally true of SMS and of IM).

The problem is that no one is listening.

More accurately, the problem with Twitter is that there is no conversation to listen to. To borrow Gertrude Stein’s description of Oakland, there’s no there there.

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Creative Commons by default

Posted on by John

(Via Lawrence Lessig)

Sony’s new competitor to YouTube, eyeVio, will license content users upload under a Creative Commons Attribution license by default.

Lessig points to this article from Digital Trends as the source of this bit of info.

I wish Flickr would do this. Flickr already allows you to set, as an individual user, your preferences for uploaded images to default to a specific license, including several creative commons licenses, – but the global default is still “all rights reserved.”

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Open Source Flex (MPL)

Posted on by John

<Update>
It’s worth taking a look at Ed Burnette’s take on this at ZDNet: “Adobe keeps Flash, Flex close to the vest.”

Although I am certainly happy to see Adobe moving in the direction of open source, it is good to more closely at the overall picture: what is being open sourced and what is not, which is exactly what Burnette does.

I guess it’s really just a question of “getting it” relative to others. The Flash player is still a closed platform, but at least it is available for Linux, unlike Silverlight.

</update>
—
Adobe seems increasingly to “get it” when it comes to enabling the modern web application environment, leveraging the strengths of the Flash player on all those dekstops, and allowing enough openness for creativity to flourish.

The latest example of which is the announcement this morning that they have open sourced the Flex SDK – compiler, libraries, and all. (Everything but the Eclipse-based IDE, which remains under a commercial license).

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