Father of Wiki Speaks on Collaborative Development 55
An anonymous reader writes "eWeek is reporting that Ward Cunningham, creator of the wiki, has predicted an encouraging future for open source and collaborative development. From the article: "Cunningham, who is director of committer community development at the Eclipse Foundation, said open-source software will continue to grow and thrive because it enables user innovation. '[...] No end user wants to be a programmer; they just want to get their jobs done,' he said. But more and more people with powerful tools and powerful languages will be able to work together to build better systems, he said."
Very Interesting Article (Score:4, Interesting)
"(Microsoft) has to inch toward this community style development, otherwise it would be irresponsible to their stock holders," Cunningham said. "What they do and say is in the best interest of their stockholders.
I thought this was an interesting angle arguing for OSS. I think many times OSS'ers seem too anti-corporate (myself included) to have thought of this angle.
I must say that I lost a very tiny bit of respect for him when he said that he "has nothing but respect for Microsoft", but my respect was pretty high to begin with so he didn't go down too far.
Re:Very Interesting Article (Score:2, Interesting)
How much respect could you have possibly had? If you truly respected him, your reaction would have been, "I don't agree with all he has to say, but since I have a lot of respect for the guy, I'll hear him out." There, now that's much more respectful than, "I don't agree with all he has to
Talking out of both sides of his mouth (Score:5, Interesting)
Reality, of course, provides the evidence that what he says is false. People are not only happy to consume others' works, but also motivated to create their own works. Whether their own works are frivolous opinions or heavy-duty scholarly works, people are motivated to create by the same desire they have to procreate. Since computer geeks are somewhat stunted in their ability to do the latter due to emotional and mental disabilities, they seek their immortality by creating very public works such as articles on Wikipedia, Open Source applications, and (godhelpme) posts on Slashdot.
Re:Talking out of both sides of his mouth (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Talking out of both sides of his mouth (Score:2)
Re:Talking out of both sides of his mouth (Score:2)
Re:Talking out of both sides of his mouth (Score:3, Insightful)
...Are you saying that, all these times I've modded goatse posts down, I was really blocking the ability of artists to express themselves?
Oh, God! What have I done?
Re:Talking out of both sides of his mouth (Score:2)
Carrie? Carrie Bradshaw? Is that you?
Re:Talking out of both sides of his mouth (Score:2)
All contributors are users first, but not all users end up as contributors. Obviously, one needs to be familiar with the software or wiki before one starts p
Re:karma++ (Score:1)
As a frequent Wiki editor, I'd just like to say .. (Score:1, Funny)
No end user wants to be a programmer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No end user wants to be a programmer? (Score:1)
We're long-past the dark ages of IT (Score:5, Insightful)
Under this definition, anyone who writes anything of any complexity in a modern wordprocessor is a programmer. Modern WP packages can be regarded as shells in which the operator enters instructions (literal formatting commands, such as right-justify, or bold), decisions (floating tables, grammar/spellcheck), loops/recursion (automatic table of contents, automatic indexing), etc. On WP's like Wordperfect, you could actually make all of the commands visible. It frightened users to do that, because it showed just how much coding they were actually doing.
The power of high-level tools, then, is not to help the user avoid programming, it is to help the user avoid seeing what they're programming. It isn't to do the user's work for them, it is to allow the user to sidestep their phobias long enough to get the work done.
One of the follies of fourth- and fifth-generation programming languages was the assumption that programmers wanted their programming hidden from them as well. It is certainly true that software designers need to have a high level of abstraction, as they don't need to know the details (and shouldn't). It is also true that there are special cases in programming where you need minor scripting changes to have a big impact on the end result. In these cases, high level programming is entirely correct. The rest of the time, when details are everything, you don't want any more abstraction than you can possibly get away with.
For end-users, though, applications really need to be extremely high-level programming languages and very little more. That is why Word (which is essentially a scripting engine with a bunch of macros pre-programmed in) is useful to end-users, even though AmiPro is technically superior and Ventura Publisher is much more impressive. Word is a programming tool that can do anything Visual Basic can do, whereas the others are only applications. The user may claim to hate programming, but they can claim it all they like. The fact remains that they pick the programming tool over the "pure" application - when it is disguised cleverly enough.
Re:We're long-past the dark ages of IT (Score:3, Insightful)
We're long-past the dark ages of Generalizing (Score:2, Insightful)
No, the point of high-level tools is to allow the user to focus on the domain their problem lies in, while avoiding extraneous material. That's why you'll be seeing more DSL's and other tools.
Extranious (Score:2)
Precisely for this reason, you absolutely do NOT want a product that o
Re:We're long-past the dark ages of IT (Score:2)
OSS is just the outgrowth of the public internet (Score:3, Interesting)
What we do need to realize is that closed-source/proprietary has its role as well. If the goal is "freedom" for the user then that has to encompass all the tools available. The GPL and the strong leadership of Torvalds has insured a level playing field for that above it on the software stack but we need to be wary of Stallman/FSF fascist dogma. Open Source tends to work very well at the lower levels of the software stack - glibc, the kernel, other libraries, but we need to recognize that we need to provide incentives to innovate at the ever higher-ends of the software stack as well. I consider the rather luke-warm adoption of desktop linux (yes it is, I've been using it a work for the past 8 years) to be indicative of both factionalization and the perils of "giving everything away" at the higher-end of the software stack.
I would keep an eye out on croquet [opencroquet.org] (or something in that realm), for what will be the next leap in collaboration. Definitely check out this [sonicfoundry.com] recent video (might be windows only). I consider this web 3.0
Re:OSS is just the outgrowth of the public interne (Score:1)
I'm glad to see someone else take Stallman to task. It wouldn't call him fascist though; he's more of a communist. He is to the services-based economy what Marx was to the manufacturing-based economy. Little does the FSF realize that profits are an incentive to create value for society. Open source software is inherently commodity, and thus produces little innovation. Compare that to Mac OS X, Solaris, and yes, even Windows.
I absolutely agree that lower-level software probably ought to be open source pure
Re:OSS is just the outgrowth of the public interne (Score:2)
I think you don't understand Stallman's views on server communication.
he, is fine with networking with servers that do not distribute code.
service oriented Arcitectures are not anti GPL cause you can Mod the code on your server. and as long as you don't distribute the code you don't have to release you changes.
mind you, for your sake he would hope that you have access to the code, running on your server.
but that is your issu
an hypercard for 21 century... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:an hypercard for 21 century... (Score:2)
Re:an hypercard for 21 century... (Score:2)
Its not all good (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Its not all good....but it has potential (Score:2, Interesting)
I rec'd quite a few bug reports with included suggestions for appropriate fixes which were tested and happily integrated into the upcoming revision.
Not everyone wants to "help" like this but there were some truly great folks "among the customers" who couldn't wait for the update cycle to get their work done. NOT having access to the source (which eventually came to pass) was a sad day for m
Re:Its not all good....but it has potential (Score:2)
Re:Its not all good (Score:2, Insightful)
The Funniest Collaborative Project of All Time (Score:1)
Tom
HyperCard's potential clear from the start (Score:3, Interesting)
I recall the palpable buzz at the an Apple developer conference (Canberra? The year I read Jonno's copy of Vernor Vinge's The Peace War(?) during the long drive from Melbourne) where illicit copies of Silver Surfer -- pre-release HyperCard -- were being smuggled on to developers' systems and whispered about. Believe me, almost everyone who saw it -- five years before Berners-Lee kicked off the WWW on his NeXT -- recognised how exciting a paradigm it defined. Including Apple! On the Mac, for high level application developers, this was the era of Helix (exciting) and OMNIS (not very). (Confession: I think I was too young to entirely get what the fuss was all about.)
In those eight years before the web took firm hold, HyperCard was constantly promoted and bundled in very visible form (including printed manuals) with every Macintosh sold. It had a plugin architecture, and a massive roster of third party developers and solutions. My brother built an accounting system for a family business with it.
As a more bare-metal C/Pascal Mac developer during this period, I sometimes grew exasperated at the ubiquity of this seemingly pedestrian product I wasn't much interested in using!
Silver Surfer (Score:1)
HyperCard was originally called WildCard, hence the creator code 'WILD'.
Re:Silver Surfer - thanks - memory fade (Score:2)
What's the quote? (Score:1)
Dilbert (Score:2)
Dilbert summed it up quite perfectly:
(1991-12-11)
Ward to speak on wikis (Score:1)
Users... or useless? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know how many times I've clicked on the "documentation" link in a project only to be greeted with "Coming Soon!". Never mind design documents.
I think we're going to need a much higher level of abstraction for code before we reach a tipping point where projects can survive and grow without their lead creator.
--Rob
Users... or useless?-MDA. (Score:1, Interesting)
A programmer would most likely feel that accounting is inherently complex, while a CPA wouldn't. In other words complexity is relative. The problem is that the field of programming isn't geared towards making accountants or other professionals (domain experts) into programmers. But making programmers into bigger programmers. Kind of like being a translator. A translator c
Microsoft moving towards community development (Score:1)
FTFA:
And though Microsoft is slow to adopt the community model of development, they are headed for it, Cunningham said.
I was surprised at this, given how much MS has attacked the open-source movement in the past. After all, OSS is communism [hopto.org], right?
But then I realized that "the community model of development" doesn't necessarily mean open-source, it just implies a certain amount of feedback from the "community", whatever that is, to the project's decision-makers.
Everyone involved in a project within
Alas Simplicity (Score:4, Interesting)
nothing new here.. (Score:2, Insightful)