Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Fsuk-manchester Digest, Vol 47, Issue 7

[Pete Morris]

I think this is missing the point a bit. The article isn’t really talking about open source, other than using it as a visual-aid example. What they are saying is that if you let anyone submit anything willy nilly (i.e. without quality control), then you will end up with a lot of trash rather than a few high quality apps.

 

This happens within open source as much as anywhere. Granted you are ‘free’ to make any changes you want, but unless they are quality improvements, they won’t be grafted back into the main tree. You can’t just rock up with some random code which may or may not make things worse or indeed do anything worthwhile, and expect it to appear in the next kernel release.

 

The bit about Google is that they specialise in taking existing luke-warm ideas and polishing them up into high-demand products. MultiMap had been around for years, but Google Maps took it to a whole new level of fanciness. No one uses MultiMap now. The same with Gmail, and even their oft-forgotten page-rank search engine itself. How many people use AltaVista still?

 

So this article is really nothing about open source or free software or anything. It’s just making two points:

1)      Tight quality control leads to trusted products

2)      Google have a habit of taking your existing idea, making it better, and then putting you out of business by making your original idea obsolete

 

Pete

 

 

From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of Anna Morris
Sent: 09 May 2011 15:33
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Fsuk-manchester Digest, Vol 47, Issue 7

 

 

On Monday 09 May 2011 10:03:20 Anna Morris wrote:
> Thought this was interesting, but mostly, just wanted to point out that it
> was at number 3 for most read all morning. oooh.

Thanks for sharing. Nice for the BBC to remind us that freedom, choice and
fairer competition are a bad thing.

Sam.

It was this part

"Ideas grab

Which is why Google will eventually win, according to Mr Heller.

"Some of them may do certain things pretty well but eventually Google just takes the good ideas and fold them into their own product as best they can."

that I found intresting but strage. I don't understand what they are driving at. Its like they say that open is bad becuase it makes them less competative but if they make money, they are cheeting somehow. : S