Re:The deployment pipe often gets neglected in OSS
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 1
Just a little correction to help you with English grammar/spelling. (I assume German is your native language. Mine is English, and I'm better than most native speakers/writers.)
In English, when changing an adjective ending in 'y' like 'lucky' to an adverb, change the 'y' to an 'i' and add 'ly' so that 'lucky' becomes 'luckily'. Of course, in English there are exceptions to almost every rule.
And yes, your English is better than my German (none), or my French (some).
That one actually was a typo.:-) But thanks for the polite correction anyhow. And for having me learned something new. I'm actually a native speaker of both having grown up with both english and german and being the rare case of a former US citizen who became a German. But I'm safer with and more at home in german wording.;-)
The deployment pipe often gets neglected in OSS
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 1
In the community the deployment pipeline often gets neglected. I know this problem myself. You keep dev'ing at the project and tend ignore end-user ready deployment. And they have to fuss about with old versions. Luckyly we're seeing a break in this trend with OSS projects getting into competetive marketing and end-user management.
We all know these completely insane laws. In germany there about to put full responseability on Forum posts upon the person that runs the server. Could these laws and their utter stupidity be a generational problem? I mean , could it be that the people doing the decisions right now are just plain unable to grasp the concept of "Interweb" "Computer" and "Turing complete"? It would be nice to see these laws dying out together with the people who made them. What do you think?
The Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pro V2030 has a version that comes with Linux (Knoppix 4). And it thus is extremely cheap because it lacks the MS WinXP Tax. Here in germany it's only 499 Euros - it should be the same in dollars over in the US.
If you want feature richness I'd suggest getting a ThinkPad. I don't know if lenovo is screwing around, but IBM has been supporting Linux on their Laptops for quite some time now. And the hardware and service is good.
I wouldn't panic to much. Globalisation is allmost once around the globe by now. It only takes so long for countries to arrive at a simular level as others. Especially when both are racing for the true bottom line. The ones from the top and the others from the bottom. Ten years ago Taiwan was the lowest bidder in the bicyce business. Now their luxury and the bikes are built in vietnam. Not before long Gary Fisher will have a team welding somewhere in the US again.
Do what's fun. Do it good. Tell people about it. The rest just happens. Meanwhile you can offer writing procedures for network admining for outsourced admin services. At a more specialized rate that is.
"The waiter still needs 10 ashtrays for his location." (Our man upfront requests 10 kilograms of C4 for use in the local area) "Jonson will deliver the PCs to [adress],[adress] and [adress] tomorow between 10 am and 12 am" (Bombing squad will strike tomorrow between 10 and 12 at [adress],[adress] and [adress])... etc., etc. As if Terrorist would use Email encryption so they're spotted faster. What a load of rubbish.
This law is the biggest piece of bullshit the UK gov has pushed out in a long time.
As long as they don't replace Bash with cmd and Fink and the other unix stuff still works I couldn't care less. Who the hell compiles from source anyway? Even in the Linux crowd those are only a few hardliners and powertweakers. And, curiously enough, the more 'technical' the distro, the less you actually need to compile yourself. I've never got anything better from my attempts at compiling than the Debian Kernels anyway. Besides, not having to deal with all the low-level crap and weedy custom-x86 module & driver junk in a modern usable unix is the whole point of having a Mac anyway. Access to compilable source is a nice-to-have, but more in the sense of a nice-to-have CNC Cutter and the Datafiles to cut your own Motor for the car-model in your garage. Not that anyone driving a car would need that.
Believe it or not, Realplayer actually is quite a good app. It's the only commercially suported Browser-Plugin and Media-Player that runs on all three plattforms and then some (Flash only runs on 3) and the SMIL language it supports has been ahead of SVG or any other concept for nearly a decade. I don't know why people keep bashing Realplayer. Probably because it doesn't look cool or something.
To be honest, most Ultra-Compliant Standards-Nazi sites look like someone went doo-doo on my monitor. Designers usually design from the inside out, using DW or even Photoshop to sketch(!!) out the layout and stuff and then go to build their templates to be 100% compliant and accessible. Curiously enough, their sites usually look very good, are standards compliant, 100% accessible with well-built meta markup and are built from the outside in using grafics tools, editors (jEdit, Textmate, BBEdit, etc.) and the designers favourite CMS.
That's the general Pipeline of todays Webdesigners. I'd go as far as to say that most of these people work that way.
Oh Tanenbaum, oh Tanenbaum, wie grün sind deine Blätter Du grünst nicht nur zur Sommerszeit, nein auch im Winter, wenn es schneit. Oh Tanenbaum, oh Tanenbaum, wie grün sind deine Blätter
For the uninformed: Tannenbaum (with double n) is the german word for Fir (conifer) or the synonym for Christmas-Tree. The verse above is the first of a famous german christmas-carol.:-)
It's like we've been saying all these years: One-stop, hassle free PC with Linux preinstalled and all drivers in place + a top-notch, well-configured bluecurve KDE/Gnome Desktop + a neat branding is going to make the impact. Until then component-custom x86 will always be the mess it has become in the last 20 years. With only preinstalled MS WinWhatever to haphazardly disguise that mess.
Until someone does this all-in-one Linux PC thing, Apple is going to nibble away marketshare with their Mac-Mini concept.
It violates the GPL. It's that simple. Of course he just want's to build a hassle free distro. Kudos to him. But the next thing we know is Microsoft 'just wanting to provide a hassle-free Direct X for Linux' and shipping it precomiled. As much as it hurts, here's where we ALL have to draw the line.
The way around, of course, is automating the process of compilation upon install.
Bottom line: It violates the GPL. Kernel Source Copyright holders can sue you. Don't do it.
Wrong. OSS/Indie gaming will shake the market. Just not right now. One of the most successfull games ever, Counterstrike, is a friggin *freeware* mod. Now imagine an OSS 3D engine like CrystalSpace combined with a tool like Blender. That scares the piss out of publishers like EA.
Who is going to buy Unreal Tournament 2009 when you can build it? Gamingbusiness will be all about services just like the other parts of IT and Media, it will only take longer because leveraging the technology takes more work. You won't be paying for games or content, you'll be paying for access, maintainance and proactive hack/cheat prevention. And the membership of a professional league. It will be just like sports. I don't have to pay some company to explain to me the rules of soccer, do I? No. But I do need to pay to get access to training and a good stadium in order to play at a certain level. That's how it will be.
RoR is a good OS product that helps people solve problems that really bug them. It doesn't - contrary to lot's of other OSS projects - have a website that looks and works like crap . It's lead developers actually have social skills (and running businesses) and can talk coherently in a way that normal people actually understand them. They are tight with the blogging community and are smart enough not to be arrogant and thus convince even the most fanatic Java people to check out their toy. They started the whole webcast thing and built RoR for an actual real life business project they wanted to do (www.basecamphq.com) before going OSS.
Technology wise there is not that much new. Zope is still lightyears ahead of everything else (including RoR) but only last year did their website stop looking and acting like a total pile of doo-doo. Yet still Zope.org's Navigation is somewhat '99ish and much more intimidating and overwelming than the friendly and straightforward RoR Site.
Then there's Django. Which is very neat, partly even better than RoR (and friends with the RoR project), but went OSS a little later than RoR and thus needs to catch up on awareness a little. Symfony is PHPs late answer to the RoR induced MVC frenzy and still to new to gain awareness momentum. CakePHP and P4A seem ok but don't have the marketing stance to be of any significance anytime in the future. They're both so nineties it hurts and thus will wither and die.
Bottom line: RoR are a OSS project that isn't just good at coding or using exotic technologies, they actually have the skill to market it aswell. And they were the first in the framework camp. It's that simple.
Yet another reason for the mindless keypunchers to use Word for everything that involves a screen, keyboard and typing. MS Outlook screwed up and degraded mail for all of us within less that 10 years, MS Doc screwed up document exchange and now Word will fuck up Blogging and online Web-CMS based editing for good. Just great.
In fact it's so cool it's reason enough to change the field of IT work. It's the Pixelcorp and they call their type of organisation 'Guild' as in the olden days. A pretty fitting term if you ask me. It's a global organisation of Digital Production and Media Professionals. I'm seriously considering founding an IT workers Guild based on their model. They even bargain with Software Vendors for discounts on those hideously expensive Digital Production tools and are called in for expertise whenever needed. Well respected within the industry and the workers. A very well executed professional organisation indeed.
Give me break. Everybody knows that BerkleyDB is an unstable, sorry excuse for a DB that makes MySQL 4 look like the god-sent of all DBs. And lack of standards and arrogance certainly isn't a thing of the OSS community. Especially not the Linux Kernel people. "My biggest Job is to say 'No.' to new features." Hits the nail on the head. And from what I can tell Linux is anything but a weedy mess maintained by daredevils who don't care about stability. Some commercial vendors would give their right arm to have a piece of software like the Linux Kernel in their stock. There are enough OSS projects out there that are very well maintained and offer the cream of software quality. Your rant is baseless.
So you think PS3 will fail? You are watching the PSP, are you? They are pushing it with some serious oomph. You get UMD Versions with every new DVD release of a movie. The games rock. The display rocks. The upcoming games rock. Sticks are getting cheaper by the minute. All the upsides carry well across loadtimes and battery time. If my cash-level rises again I'll maybe even get one. Never thought I would.
Sony isn't a small company. They don't need to fire away crates of cash as MS has to in order to enter the market. They only need to stay downward compatible and build a box that doesn't suck. Add a Linux Kit, a good developer kit and a up-to-date Final Fantasy title and they're in the game again. Actually, they never where out. I gather the PS2 is selling well and still generating revenue, no?
So when I'm doing a phat Typo3 Project Kaspar Skarhoj is the best choice for advice? Yes.
If I wanna do some Real Time 3D thing I need Ton Roosendaal and the Blender Crew? Right.
Do I need this company? No.
To me it just looks like some shop trying to feed of the OSS community. This might be attrative for someone who's good at coding but can't market himself. But from what I can tell all those people at project leads are doing perfectly well in doing business all by themselves.
I HATE VI. Convince me otherwise.
on
Vim 7 Released
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· Score: 1
I use jEdit. Only downside with that is that it's a slowpoke compared to Vi or Emacs. No news here. Question: Besides requireing to turn your brain off when learning to operate it, does Vim do all the stuff jEdit can do? Line Numbering, Folding, Bracket Scope Highlighting... What's with search and replace across directories, etc. Or is it that one is expected to use other CLI tools for that?
Calling this guy a publisher is stretching it a little, imho. The website looks somewhat shoddy and homegrown.
There are other publishers using OSS exclusively that deserve the term. For instance T3N, a regular german magazin on Typo3 uses the CMS Typo3 as publishing tool. They generate the digital prints by Typo3 driven PDF generation. And the bi-monthly 80 Page magazin - available at every larger Newspaper dealer - , albeight having a slightly 'technical' 2-column layout, is a full-blown professional publication, and not just some fanzine. That's what I call OSS driven publishing.
Oh, and, btw, if your wondering why in heavens name someone would have the wacky idea to publish a magazin on Typo3 like others publish magazines on, let's say, PHP or Java, you might be interested to hear that T3N is just in it's 3rd issue and is growing *fast* and steep in print run volume. That is because in Germany _*EVERYBODY*_ uses Typo3. Everybody. Which is unfortunate for me because I'm trying to make a living in Germany doing web developement and don't like T3 that much.... Ah, well, it's open source, so it's not that bad. Allthough I'm beginning to suspect that Typo3 is some brigdehead for a Danish Invasion of Germany of some sort. I recall we had some kind of war something like 110 years ago or so. Must be that there's still some stuff not settled yet. And Kaspar Skarhoj probably is some secrect agent of the danish crown.:-)
I think the enhanced version is pretty cool. As it is aparent that there IS a signficiant difference to the original due to the lack of technology and money back in the seventies. However, I'd compile a reedit. Enhanced ANH,ESB,ROJ but with original Skywalker at the end of ROJ (that's gonna cost Lukas 10 years in hell anyway, I guess) and, of course, Han Solo shooting first.
The Rest is really worth the tuneup. Mos Eisley more crowded, the one or other neat exterior, better Space and Death Star combat, etc... all do the film some good imho.
The best part about it is that we can still do the same things only on a shoestring budget. Lot's of ideas floating about and lot's of interest groups implementing them as spinoffs and after-hour projects.
And it's nearly as much fun.:-)
That's the big upside of IT and open source. It costs nothing and evolves so quickly that stuff costing millions a few years ago are available as a free Web 2.0 solution nowadays. The Age of Cyberpunk, that's what it is.
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Just a little correction to help you with English grammar/spelling. (I assume German is your native language. Mine is English, and I'm better than most native speakers/writers.)
:-) But thanks for the polite correction anyhow. And for having me learned something new. I'm actually a native speaker of both having grown up with both english and german and being the rare case of a former US citizen who became a German. But I'm safer with and more at home in german wording. ;-)
In English, when changing an adjective ending in 'y' like 'lucky' to an adverb, change the 'y' to an 'i' and add 'ly' so that 'lucky' becomes 'luckily'. Of course, in English there are exceptions to almost every rule.
And yes, your English is better than my German (none), or my French (some).
That one actually was a typo.
In the community the deployment pipeline often gets neglected. I know this problem myself. You keep dev'ing at the project and tend ignore end-user ready deployment. And they have to fuss about with old versions. Luckyly we're seeing a break in this trend with OSS projects getting into competetive marketing and end-user management.
We all know these completely insane laws. In germany there about to put full responseability on Forum posts upon the person that runs the server.
Could these laws and their utter stupidity be a generational problem? I mean , could it be that the people doing the decisions right now are just plain unable to grasp the concept of "Interweb" "Computer" and "Turing complete"? It would be nice to see these laws dying out together with the people who made them.
What do you think?
The Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pro V2030 has a version that comes with Linux (Knoppix 4). And it thus is extremely cheap because it lacks the MS WinXP Tax. Here in germany it's only 499 Euros - it should be the same in dollars over in the US.
If you want feature richness I'd suggest getting a ThinkPad. I don't know if lenovo is screwing around, but IBM has been supporting Linux on their Laptops for quite some time now. And the hardware and service is good.
I wouldn't panic to much. Globalisation is allmost once around the globe by now. It only takes so long for countries to arrive at a simular level as others. Especially when both are racing for the true bottom line. The ones from the top and the others from the bottom. Ten years ago Taiwan was the lowest bidder in the bicyce business. Now their luxury and the bikes are built in vietnam. Not before long Gary Fisher will have a team welding somewhere in the US again.
Do what's fun. Do it good. Tell people about it. The rest just happens. Meanwhile you can offer writing procedures for network admining for outsourced admin services. At a more specialized rate that is.
"The waiter still needs 10 ashtrays for his location." (Our man upfront requests 10 kilograms of C4 for use in the local area) ... etc., etc.
"Jonson will deliver the PCs to [adress],[adress] and [adress] tomorow between 10 am and 12 am" (Bombing squad will strike tomorrow between 10 and 12 at [adress],[adress] and [adress])
As if Terrorist would use Email encryption so they're spotted faster. What a load of rubbish.
This law is the biggest piece of bullshit the UK gov has pushed out in a long time.
As long as they don't replace Bash with cmd and Fink and the other unix stuff still works I couldn't care less. Who the hell compiles from source anyway? Even in the Linux crowd those are only a few hardliners and powertweakers. And, curiously enough, the more 'technical' the distro, the less you actually need to compile yourself. I've never got anything better from my attempts at compiling than the Debian Kernels anyway. Besides, not having to deal with all the low-level crap and weedy custom-x86 module & driver junk in a modern usable unix is the whole point of having a Mac anyway.
Access to compilable source is a nice-to-have, but more in the sense of a nice-to-have CNC Cutter and the Datafiles to cut your own Motor for the car-model in your garage. Not that anyone driving a car would need that.
Believe it or not, Realplayer actually is quite a good app. It's the only commercially suported Browser-Plugin and Media-Player that runs on all three plattforms and then some (Flash only runs on 3) and the SMIL language it supports has been ahead of SVG or any other concept for nearly a decade. I don't know why people keep bashing Realplayer. Probably because it doesn't look cool or something.
That's probably because you're not a designer.
To be honest, most Ultra-Compliant Standards-Nazi sites look like someone went doo-doo on my monitor. Designers usually design from the inside out, using DW or even Photoshop to sketch(!!) out the layout and stuff and then go to build their templates to be 100% compliant and accessible.
Curiously enough, their sites usually look very good, are standards compliant, 100% accessible with well-built meta markup and are built from the outside in using grafics tools, editors (jEdit, Textmate, BBEdit, etc.) and the designers favourite CMS.
That's the general Pipeline of todays Webdesigners. I'd go as far as to say that most of these people work that way.
This is a neat update to the Mac line, but some things bug me about it:
1) iBook used to be the cheapest Subnotebook available. That has changed, with cool-looking widescreen subnote PCs available for 800$ or even less.
2) 3D is gone. That is bad. My iBook has a 3D gfx chip (ATI) and I use it too.
Oh Tanenbaum, oh Tanenbaum, wie grün sind deine Blätter
:-)
Du grünst nicht nur zur Sommerszeit, nein auch im Winter, wenn es schneit.
Oh Tanenbaum, oh Tanenbaum, wie grün sind deine Blätter
For the uninformed: Tannenbaum (with double n) is the german word for Fir (conifer) or the synonym for Christmas-Tree. The verse above is the first of a famous german christmas-carol.
It's like we've been saying all these years: One-stop, hassle free PC with Linux preinstalled and all drivers in place + a top-notch, well-configured bluecurve KDE/Gnome Desktop + a neat branding is going to make the impact. Until then component-custom x86 will always be the mess it has become in the last 20 years. With only preinstalled MS WinWhatever to haphazardly disguise that mess.
Until someone does this all-in-one Linux PC thing, Apple is going to nibble away marketshare with their Mac-Mini concept.
It violates the GPL. It's that simple.
Of course he just want's to build a hassle free distro. Kudos to him. But the next thing we know is Microsoft 'just wanting to provide a hassle-free Direct X for Linux' and shipping it precomiled.
As much as it hurts, here's where we ALL have to draw the line.
The way around, of course, is automating the process of compilation upon install.
Bottom line:
It violates the GPL. Kernel Source Copyright holders can sue you. Don't do it.
Wrong.
OSS/Indie gaming will shake the market. Just not right now. One of the most successfull games ever, Counterstrike, is a friggin *freeware* mod. Now imagine an OSS 3D engine like CrystalSpace combined with a tool like Blender. That scares the piss out of publishers like EA.
Who is going to buy Unreal Tournament 2009 when you can build it? Gamingbusiness will be all about services just like the other parts of IT and Media, it will only take longer because leveraging the technology takes more work.
You won't be paying for games or content, you'll be paying for access, maintainance and proactive hack/cheat prevention. And the membership of a professional league. It will be just like sports. I don't have to pay some company to explain to me the rules of soccer, do I? No. But I do need to pay to get access to training and a good stadium in order to play at a certain level. That's how it will be.
RoR is a good OS product that helps people solve problems that really bug them. It doesn't - contrary to lot's of other OSS projects - have a website that looks and works like crap . It's lead developers actually have social skills (and running businesses) and can talk coherently in a way that normal people actually understand them. They are tight with the blogging community and are smart enough not to be arrogant and thus convince even the most fanatic Java people to check out their toy. They started the whole webcast thing and built RoR for an actual real life business project they wanted to do (www.basecamphq.com) before going OSS.
Technology wise there is not that much new. Zope is still lightyears ahead of everything else (including RoR) but only last year did their website stop looking and acting like a total pile of doo-doo. Yet still Zope.org's Navigation is somewhat '99ish and much more intimidating and overwelming than the friendly and straightforward RoR Site.
Then there's Django. Which is very neat, partly even better than RoR (and friends with the RoR project), but went OSS a little later than RoR and thus needs to catch up on awareness a little. Symfony is PHPs late answer to the RoR induced MVC frenzy and still to new to gain awareness momentum. CakePHP and P4A seem ok but don't have the marketing stance to be of any significance anytime in the future. They're both so nineties it hurts and thus will wither and die.
Bottom line: RoR are a OSS project that isn't just good at coding or using exotic technologies, they actually have the skill to market it aswell. And they were the first in the framework camp. It's that simple.
Yet another reason for the mindless keypunchers to use Word for everything that involves a screen, keyboard and typing.
MS Outlook screwed up and degraded mail for all of us within less that 10 years, MS Doc screwed up document exchange and now Word will fuck up Blogging and online Web-CMS based editing for good.
Just great.
In fact it's so cool it's reason enough to change the field of IT work. It's the Pixelcorp and they call their type of organisation 'Guild' as in the olden days. A pretty fitting term if you ask me. It's a global organisation of Digital Production and Media Professionals. I'm seriously considering founding an IT workers Guild based on their model. They even bargain with Software Vendors for discounts on those hideously expensive Digital Production tools and are called in for expertise whenever needed. Well respected within the industry and the workers.
A very well executed professional organisation indeed.
Give me break. Everybody knows that BerkleyDB is an unstable, sorry excuse for a DB that makes MySQL 4 look like the god-sent of all DBs. And lack of standards and arrogance certainly isn't a thing of the OSS community. Especially not the Linux Kernel people. "My biggest Job is to say 'No.' to new features." Hits the nail on the head. And from what I can tell Linux is anything but a weedy mess maintained by daredevils who don't care about stability. Some commercial vendors would give their right arm to have a piece of software like the Linux Kernel in their stock. There are enough OSS projects out there that are very well maintained and offer the cream of software quality. Your rant is baseless.
So you think PS3 will fail? You are watching the PSP, are you? They are pushing it with some serious oomph. You get UMD Versions with every new DVD release of a movie. The games rock. The display rocks. The upcoming games rock. Sticks are getting cheaper by the minute. All the upsides carry well across loadtimes and battery time. If my cash-level rises again I'll maybe even get one. Never thought I would.
Sony isn't a small company. They don't need to fire away crates of cash as MS has to in order to enter the market. They only need to stay downward compatible and build a box that doesn't suck. Add a Linux Kit, a good developer kit and a up-to-date Final Fantasy title and they're in the game again. Actually, they never where out. I gather the PS2 is selling well and still generating revenue, no?
So when I'm doing a phat Typo3 Project Kaspar Skarhoj is the best choice for advice?
Yes.
If I wanna do some Real Time 3D thing I need Ton Roosendaal and the Blender Crew?
Right.
Do I need this company?
No.
To me it just looks like some shop trying to feed of the OSS community. This might be attrative for someone who's good at coding but can't market himself. But from what I can tell all those people at project leads are doing perfectly well in doing business all by themselves.
I use jEdit. Only downside with that is that it's a slowpoke compared to Vi or Emacs. No news here. Question: Besides requireing to turn your brain off when learning to operate it, does Vim do all the stuff jEdit can do? Line Numbering, Folding, Bracket Scope Highlighting ... What's with search and replace across directories, etc.
Or is it that one is expected to use other CLI tools for that?
stands for 'Visual Editor, Improved'. No shit.
Calling this guy a publisher is stretching it a little, imho. The website looks somewhat shoddy and homegrown.
... Ah, well, it's open source, so it's not that bad. Allthough I'm beginning to suspect that Typo3 is some brigdehead for a Danish Invasion of Germany of some sort. I recall we had some kind of war something like 110 years ago or so. Must be that there's still some stuff not settled yet. And Kaspar Skarhoj probably is some secrect agent of the danish crown. :-)
There are other publishers using OSS exclusively that deserve the term. For instance T3N, a regular german magazin on Typo3 uses the CMS Typo3 as publishing tool. They generate the digital prints by Typo3 driven PDF generation. And the bi-monthly 80 Page magazin - available at every larger Newspaper dealer - , albeight having a slightly 'technical' 2-column layout, is a full-blown professional publication, and not just some fanzine. That's what I call OSS driven publishing.
Oh, and, btw, if your wondering why in heavens name someone would have the wacky idea to publish a magazin on Typo3 like others publish magazines on, let's say, PHP or Java, you might be interested to hear that T3N is just in it's 3rd issue and is growing *fast* and steep in print run volume. That is because in Germany _*EVERYBODY*_ uses Typo3. Everybody. Which is unfortunate for me because I'm trying to make a living in Germany doing web developement and don't like T3 that much.
I think the enhanced version is pretty cool. As it is aparent that there IS a signficiant difference to the original due to the lack of technology and money back in the seventies. However, I'd compile a reedit. Enhanced ANH,ESB,ROJ but with original Skywalker at the end of ROJ (that's gonna cost Lukas 10 years in hell anyway, I guess) and, of course, Han Solo shooting first.
... all do the film some good imho.
The Rest is really worth the tuneup. Mos Eisley more crowded, the one or other neat exterior, better Space and Death Star combat, etc
The best part about it is that we can still do the same things only on a shoestring budget. Lot's of ideas floating about and lot's of interest groups implementing them as spinoffs and after-hour projects.
:-)
And it's nearly as much fun.
That's the big upside of IT and open source. It costs nothing and evolves so quickly that stuff costing millions a few years ago are available as a free Web 2.0 solution nowadays. The Age of Cyberpunk, that's what it is.