The Inflatable Soapbox

I followed a link on Twitter this afternoon from Dave Sifry, founder of Linuxcare and Technorati, to this post by Glyn Moody. Sifry has started a new service, hoosgot, that allows you to post a request to the web at large for anything: information, stuff, a job, whatever. You can also see the stream of requests from others and respond to it, if you have what they need. A pretty cool and simple idea, resurrecting lazyweb for 2008.

This has been the idea behind GNU/Linux and open source from the outset: create an ever-growing shared library of freely usable, modifiable standards-based tools. Then use those, with a little code glue, to quickly create new applications. Great stuff! Thanks to Dave Sifry for demonstrating this so competently, and to Glyn Moody for bringing attention to it.

This will be my prediction for 2008: Free and Open Source software will be recognized as secure, reliable tools for achieving business  goals. It’s about time.

The title of this post is a reference to the way Free and Open Source software in general, and Linux specifically, have shown the way to escape the prison of proprietary software and the concept, perhaps, of intellectual property. Read the rest of this entry »