It's a cold and rainy day today. We just had the freakiest hale storm I've seen in quite a while. It's a good day to be inside. While watching the Jays get pounded by the Red Sox (man, they Jays need better pitching), I watched the Google Wave keynote from last week's Google IO. BTW, I finally found a good use for twitter as I followed a couple of guys I know who were there who kept us up to date on what was going on. That was good because the video didn't show the standing O that the presentors got (it was good but standing O good?)
Anyway, I am quite impressed by the workflows and concepts behind Wave. If you haven't seen it yet, Wave is really just a good realization of collaboration tooling that we kind of see in IBM's Jazz, but more general. You could also see it as a redesign of e-mail systems to take into account and interface with or replace all the other social networking tools out there. The coolest feature is the real-time collaboration you can do, and of course, the API that allows you to play in this world too.
We've talked about IDE in the cloud a bit in Eclipse and, while not for everyone, I think it has potential. And Google Wave seems like a good framework to make this happen. Add an extension to interact with a server side Eclipse, and you get instant integration with the rest of your collaboration tools. Interesting potential.
But there was something else that struck me. Google is open sourcing pretty much all of this. They want to build Wave as an ecosystem to get as many people working through their browser as possible. I still haven't figure out how that makes Google money, but I'm sure there's a master plan at work there. But one thing you'll notice, is that Google worked for two years behind closed doors before pushing it out. This is the same way IBM put together Eclipse, how QNX pushed out CDT. It happens a lot.
And that got me thinking. Is this the only way innovation happens, i.e., in closed environments. How much innovation really happens in open source projects or at least how efficient is it? Realistically, it's a lot less than you'd think. Innovation happens when get get a crack team together in a highly collaborative environment where you don't need to spend time working with a community of diverse interests. So while open source helps make a technology popular, I don't think it's possible to create it there. But maybe that's stating the obvious.
About Me
- Doug Schaefer
- Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
- I am the Eclipse CDT Project Lead amongst other things at eclipse. Lately I'm getting more into Mobile app development trying to understand the tools you need for that.
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4 comments:
Hi Doug. FYI, we (ECF) have been doing something quite similar to wave for some time now (e.g. rt shared editing, operational transformation, and multipoint messaging)...and we will be able to interoperate with wave easily. So I wouldn't say your 'innovation happens only by commercial entities' thesis is correct. OTOH, Google has the money and mkting muscle to push such innovations to be widely available and popular...which certainly is an advantage in today's sw world.
I don't think communication is the innovation behind Wave. I'd say it's the real-time collaboration in a browser that's got people excited.
I'm starting to understand why the platform team is so eager for e4. I continue to be surprised at how much you can do in a browser and you start to wonder if you really need rich client apps any more.
But I wonder out loud whether e4 is going to be better than GWT. We may be better off increasing the investment in server side Eclipse and getting it to work well with Wave. Mind you there's probably someone starting that innovation already behind closed doors. ;)
Innovation happens when people have the freedom to experiment and make changes. It depends on the rules that are set in place. When a product gets to a certain stage and people always want to maintain the prior interface contracts, it can start to stiffle the innovation in a particular product.
Freedom to experiment, change, evolve, and yes break api when necessary are crucial regardless of whether the end game is developed as close source or open source.
There's two competing threads here.
Innovation happens by people who have (a) bright ideas, and (b) resources to make it happen.
Neither of these are inherently tied to commercial/closed-source projects, though. It's just that commercial organisations tend to have the latter, generally speaking.
But bear in mind that a lot of open-source stuff that's created is done by those that aren't paid full-time to work on those things. It's only been in the relatively recent past that companies have paid full-time people to work on open-source projects.
Look at some of the apps coming out on the iPhone. Tap Tap Revenge was initially created as a black project on hacked iPhones, but then went on to be a commercial success - not the other way around.
Finally, innovation is two things; the creation of entirely new ways of doing things, but also the adaptation of existing technology to do completely different things. Who knew that a bytecode vm for set-top boxes would never end up on those set-top boxes but almost every computer on the planet?
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