It lurked me today while getting into the unknown dimensions with which some applications architecture is deepened so deep. As I was surfing around the tools which are there on the open source world I found plenty which are duplicate efforts or efforts with minor changes to the one which are already out there. Now, this could be very much true for various other suite of applications. And its true that there is no control over the open source community on what you can or should build and what you cannot or shouldn’t! At SourceForge the possibilities are endless. And it should be because we are talking about the open source world. Its a free community of developers and by far the best. But the point here is should this community be controlled in terms of wasting the re-development of those products which are already out there?
Its a very debatable question. And it seems quite annoying argument to me personally. But if I look beyond the realm it might give a way into more innovative practices of the open source development community rather than limiting their innovation itself. I’m looking here only at the positive side folks. The negatives could be pondered on once we know what’s the benefit already.
Quite surprisingly its not a reality check now or something new which development community has never noticed before. But whenever we come across something like the scenario mentioned here above we simply pass on or just ignore that it exists. I for one wasn’t sure whether I should discuss this in length or breadth. But surely this a topic which could be brought up if not in the immediate future then in the future sometime.
I also suspect that with these buy outs of open source companies we might see a new standard evolving. Or for that matter a control of quality in producing those open source applications. Now I wouldn’t correlate this with the assumption that there would be a mass production of the applications or for that matter the effects of enterprise software would be seen in the open source world as well but surely things are going to change in the open source world with in the next couple of years. And we just have to wait and see what those changes would be or if we get lucky then we could probably get an opportunity to contribute to those changes.
