Old school
One thing in Ross’s post merited a comment here: he says that we’re “old school” for thinking that we can convince developers to build on our closed-source platform.
I’d like to suggest instead that it’s “old school” to focus exclusively on the openness of the code when the openness of the data is at least as important. Aren’t Flickr, del.icio.us, Technorati, Google, Amazon, and Ebay closed-source platforms, and haven’t they spurred some of the most interesting “innovation at the edge” that we’ve seen in the past couple of years?
I’m certainly not the first to notice this. Steve Mallet, Jeremy Zawodny and Jon Udell have all made similar points. Tim O’Reilly offers an excellent summary of this vision:
Rather than thinking of open source only as a set of software licenses and associated software development practices, we do better to think of it as a field of scientific and economic inquiry, one with many historical precedents, and part of a broader social and economic story. We must understand the impact of such factors as standards and their effect on commoditization, system architecture and network effects, and the development practices associated with software as a service.
The reason that Flickr, del.icio.us, et al. have spawned innovation is that they exemplify the approach of using open standards to build software-as-service. Put more simply, it’s very easy to get your stuff in and out. You can use the Flickr API to show images on a map (in more than one way). The del.icio.us API lets you build a few different blog integration tools, a Firefox plugin, and all kinds of other stuff. You can find many more examples by using another popular example of software-as-service.
When we debuted at Web 2.0, we described JotSpot as being part of a network of small pieces, loosely joined. We showed how you can get data into our system via SMTP, REST, RSS, SOAP, XML-over-HTTP-transformed-with-XSLT – take your pick. And since day 1 we’ve been able to transform your wiki’s data back into any of those formats. In fact, we make it as easy as possible for you to dump your entire wiki to your hard drive at any time (formatted nicely as XHTML, with all revisions and attachments included).
We believe that open data is at least as important as open code, and we’ve already demonstrated a solid commitment to that vision. I think that’s “new school.”
PS: This is not to say that open source is unimportant. Our platform contains many open-source components, we’ve financed major contributions to free software, and some of our employees spend significant fractions of their day managing open-source projects. We’ll have some interesting announcements about open source in the future.
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Murder, Death, Kill
That’s the idea you get from reading the idea that we are in the times of
Trackback by Oliver Thylmann\’s Blog — 1/19/2005 @ 1:29 am
Opening shots in a wiki war?
Briefly - no, I don’t think so. It all started with Matt Marshall’s article coining the term ‘wiki war’, which got picked up in various places, Graham defended Jot, Ross went on the offensive, Graham again played D, more follow
Trackback by Wikizen — 1/19/2005 @ 3:26 pm
Stand Down: Wiki-wars rethought; Plus, open source, open companies
I realize I’m a couple days late putting together my thoughts on the whole Wiki-wars dust-up between SocialText and JotSpot, but here goes. First, Matt Marshall’s original article was really substandard: pure sensationalism. I’ve enjoyed reading his…
Trackback by Jonathan Nolen — 1/21/2005 @ 12:23 am
It’s not valid to compare yourself with google, ebay etc. because you expose the data in open formats but don’t expose the source code. It just isn’t possible to put google or ebay on my hard drive, even if we all wanted to. What you’re selling would fit on a cdrom.
Open source has changed a lot of people’s perceptions about software. The question used to be “what is open source?", but now it’s “why isn’t it open source?".
Why isn’t JotSpot open source?
I’m not asking you. You already know the answers, but your proprietary advantage etc. doesn’t figure highly in the minds of customers who are asking themselves same question. If my os and my db and my web server and my app server and my languages… are open source, why isn’t my wiki?
Nice software btw.
Comment by Uncle Peter — 1/25/2005 @ 7:30 am
JotBlog
JotBlog
We believe that open data is at least as important as open code, and we’ve already demonstrated a solid commitment to that vision.
So do I!
I am looking forward to having a play with Jotspot. My goal is to be able to provide a useful se…
Trackback by Sugarmouse in the world — 1/27/2005 @ 6:13 am
Open Companies More Important than Open Source
I had missed the tempest in a teapot between Jot and SocialText, but whil catching up with these old news I found this mouthful from Jonathan D. Nolen: "What it comes down to for me as a customer, really, is…
Trackback by Olivier Travers — 2/4/2005 @ 2:23 am
Uncle Peter - are you saying the source code, images, etc. for Ebay or Google takes up more than 40GB? No way.
Comment by David — 2/17/2005 @ 9:25 am
Just so everybody’s on the same page, I used the RSS feeds that del.icio.us provides to make the ‘integration’ I wrote about, not the del.icio.us API.
Comment by Richard — 2/20/2005 @ 10:09 pm
David (who responded to Peters post) -
I think Uncle Peter meant that you can’t get the *value* of google or ebay on a hard drive. The value of eBay and google lie outside of it’s source code. eBay has a huge user and partner base. Google has a big corporate HQ filled with cutting edge enterprise-class hardware and brilliant people who provide more intelligent search services than anyone else. JotSpot’s value is in it’s software. As a user coming across such software for the first time, I do ask myself “Why isn’t this open source?” and “Is there an open source alternative out there?”
Comment by Raffi — 3/9/2005 @ 2:17 pm
Open Source Whoring
JotSpot, like others as Jira & Confluence, Clover and IDEA, are offering free licenses to open source projects. After the usual blah-blah stating they like open source, and use a lot of it, they’ve now decided to use open source projects as their…
Trackback by Outer Web Thought Log — 3/13/2005 @ 5:53 am
You write: “We showed how you can get data into our system via SMTP, REST, RSS, SOAP, XML-over-HTTP-transformed-with-XSLT – take your pick.”
Where on your website is this information detailed?
Comment by Tom Mandel — 3/18/2005 @ 1:42 pm
It is pretty clear that open source means “open source code". I don’t understand how there can be a debate about this issue…
Comment by steel — 8/1/2005 @ 8:38 pm