I have been watching OSCON blogging this week for some red meat, some Microhate, some internecine rivalry between the left and the right of the open source software (OSS) movement, anything to overcome the summer slowdown and get a little "new news" rush. Instead I found this excellent thought piece by Illuminata's Gordon Haff, blogging from OSCON in Portland.
Truth in advertising, Gordon--like me--is a "Grey Eagle" (Data General alum), which in addition to meaning that he went through the minicomputer wars, also means that--like me--he has probably seen it all before. It is not surprising then that his and my sense of OSS history agree even though we have never spoken about it. There is one place we differ. He says, "We’re now moving to a world increasingly distant in time and place from the Unix wars." I think the interminable debates about GPL vs other licenses, the Novell/Microsoft agreement, free vs. open, and so forth are just a continuation of the UNIX wars. The AT&T legal issues he talks about have never really been settled.
But I think we do agree when it comes to his main points: it don't matter any more! Data is more important than code (always has been of course). Software as a Service (SaaS) will dominate (Gordon talks about centralized computing) as I posted on here. The desktop increasingly doesn't matter (and I contend Microsoft has already recognized that and moved on).
Maybe Gordon and I just long for the order and normalcy ( :) ) of the old days. Or maybe we just forget Wang and DEC and the ill-fated 88Open Consortium.
Oh, and by the way, the OSCON conference really peaks today and tomororw so I may get my wish for a little steak tartare.
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