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http://gamearchitect.net/Artic... By Kyle Wilson
""Software is hard," reads the quote from Donald Knuth that opens Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code. The 400 pages that follow examine why: Why is software in a never-ending state of crisis? Why do most projects end up horribly over-budget or cancelled or both? Why can't we ship code without bugs? Why, everyone asks, can't we build software the same way we build bridges? ... But the nature of software is that the problems are always different. You never have to solve the exact problem that someone's solved before, because if software already existed that solved your need, you wouldn't have to write it. Writing software is expensive. Copying software is cheap. Scott Rosenberg coins this as Rosenberg's Law: Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. The corollary is, The only software that's worth making is software that does something new."

See also the book http://www.dreamingincode.com/ by Scott Rosenberg:
"Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software sets out to understand why, through the story of one software project -- Mitch Kapor's Chandler, an ambitious, open-source effort to rethink the world of e-mail and scheduling. I spent three years following the work of the Chandler developers as they scaled programming peaks and slogged through software swamps. In Dreaming in Code I tell their stories."

I doubt it mentions how I wrote to the Chandler Project early on about using ideas like triples from my Pointrel project but did not get much of a reply... :-) Still my own project has been ongoing for decades. It's surprisingly difficult just to store and synchronize versions of data in useful ways when faced with uncertainties about future needs.

My latest attempt of many, many:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
"This stores snippets of HTML entered in a text area in a local IndexedDB database in your browser. These snippets can be displayed in a list below the edit box. TiddlyWiki was a bit of an inspiration for that list display. This is intended to support "bootstrapping" more a more complex system, such as Doug Engelbart worked toward to support a co-evolution of tools, knowledge, community, and processes."

Git is remarkable in that way in fitting into current practices of using hierarchical files changed by desktop tools. Still, it misses a lot as far as references to data items that can be exchanged globally (needing longer hashes), or dealing with large binary files (constantly rechecking stuff, but with workarounds), or dealing with rapid collaboration by several people such as to create shared drawings. But it is still awesome as far as it goes.

"Dat" is another up-and-coming approach I wish well, started by Max Ogden:
http://www.knightfoundation.or...
http://dat-data.com/
"Dat seeks to increase the traction of the open data movement by developing better tools for collaboration."

Maybe a way to get more support for this work: http://www.knightfoundation.org/blogs/knightblog/2013/1/30/news-challenge-open-gov-launches-feb-12/

Looks like OpenLeaks is propped up by the Knight Foundation ... http://www.knightfoundation.org/ ... I demand talking cars! Damn It! Where are the talking cars!