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."

Comments

Talking out of both sides of his mouth

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

No end user wants to be a programmer?

[pontifier]

Programmers are end users as well. I see a trend of allowing more and more advaced programming concepts to creep into content creation programs to allow finer control of the end result.

an hypercard for 21 century...

[soapdog]

Ward talks about how he used hypercard to create his first draft of the wiki... hypercard was very easy to use and its sad to notice how apple failed to notice its potential. For those wanting to try a new hypercard-like environment with all the bells and whistles we come to take as granted such as network support, rdbms support, multimedia, point your browsers to Runtime Revolution http://www.runrev.com/> a wonderful tool. It's also cross platfrom, write your stacks once, build to win32, macs, linux, freebsd, solaris. PS: actually I coded a simple wiki in rev in about 30 lines. And it is graphical! :-) Cheers folks