Tim O'Reilley: "one of the motivations to share -- the necessity of giving a copy of your source code (...) -- is truly gone"
Tim O'Reilley comes back to some interesting facts about Open Source software, software distribution and Web 2.0 considerations.
He's saying: "one of the motivations to share -- the necessity of giving a copy of the source in order to let someone run your program -- is truly gone. Not only is it no longer required, in the case of the largest applications, it's no longer possible."
He also presents three new ways to "Open Source" software in the new IT world:
- Keep the application proprietary but Open Source the framework used to build it.
- Figure out what "Open Services" means (pointing out the idea of Mashups that are coming now)
- Adopt the "Cloneable application" model pioneered by Ning.
The final conclusion being: "It's a very interesting time to be in Open Source. Open source zealots need to realize that open source needs to be reinvented for the new platform architecture (...)"
This is blog post really is worth the reading time. Of course, if you like the conclusions or not is another story.
