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Father of Wiki Speaks on Collaborative Development
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."
Here's an interesting quote from the article: ... Microsoft has to be more cautious. And IBM has to be more cautious. Even as a developer in the Eclipse foundation there's a certain amount of busy work that a developer has to do, like keeping an intellectual property log and stuff like that. But this is what you have to do."
"(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.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
The conundrum is that end users want to consume something that is already available, but do not want to create it themselves. Once they decide to contribute, they cease being end users and become creators. If what he says is true, the shaolin and the wu-tang could be dangerous. Creators are a different breed than end users, though, of course, the two overlap considerably. However, if we want to say that end users don't want 'to program', then why would we assume that they want to contribute as well?
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.
It was inevitable and of course it has a bright future. We don't need anybody to tell us this. Those of us that used to play around on BBSs back in the early 80s on our Apple IIes, and such, could see that.
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 (or something in that realm), for what will be the next leap in collaboration. Definitely check out this recent video (might be windows only). I consider this web 3.0
Back in the distant past, my firm released its massive source freely thinking its hardware was the secret sauce.
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 my friends and perhaps the beginning of the end for a great enterprise.
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!
you had me at #!
"IMHO, the two biggest obstacles to users contributing to projects are lack of documentation, and the inherent complexity of programming."
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 could have tools that make them more efficient, but those tools wouldn't make them experts in the information that's being transmitted.
"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."
That's were the MDA paradigm comes in handy. The documentation IS the code, and it's in a form that's palatable to people who may be experts in their particular domain, but aren't programmers. The next job skill will be being a good modeller (not as easy as people think).
Ask most wiki users what a wiki is, and they'll say something like, "It's a platform for collaborative writing." That's mainly what it's used for of course, but that's not what it is. Cunningham's original definition is much better: "The simplest database possible." And that's the concept's main virtue, simplicty. I do wish people would bear that in mind when they decide to use a wiki for something — especially when it's something that'd be better done another way.