Reading through my RSS feeds this morning, I noticed a reasonably large concentration of Diggs focused on Reddit's decision to go open source. Maybe someone thinks Digg's executive team actually reads through the froth?
Reddit gets Dugg
(Credit: Matt Asay)I guess the real problem it points out is not a code problem with Digg, but rather a people problem, since the Digg system prompts the submitter to verify that the submission is unique. Perhaps these Reddit fans chose not to notice that scads of similar postings had already hit Digg? :-)
Maybe it was just a matter of time. Yesterday Reddit went open source, but it's not alone: Facebook, eBay, Google, and other web companies have increasingly opened their platforms in various ways to achieve competitive advantage.
I've been one of the most vociferous opponents of the web companies "free-riding" on the backs of "open-source 1.0 projects," but it's increasingly clear that this phenomenon was a moment in time. A brief one.
The packaged software industry took decades to determine that open source is a winning strategy. (No, Savio Rodrigues, I'm not suggesting that it has settled on a 100 percent open-source strategy.) The web? Maybe three or four years.
Are we rapidly getting to the point where everything, including the web, will be flavored with open source to greater and lesser degrees? I think the answer is an unequivocal "Yes."
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