Open and Closed and the Value of Boundaries
May 26, 2010
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to “Standard Wishes: An Interview with the Creators of PostScript”. As we work through the program for the Lucene Revolution, I am getting some interesting information from those involved in open source search and content processing.
This interview includes an interesting comment regarding “platform independence.” I am not sure if this phrase appears in Charles Geschke’s response to the question, “What is the next outstanding problem to solve in the real of computer programming or computer science?”
The answer from Mr. Geschke was:
It is so frustrating that this many years later we’re still in an environment where someone says if you really want this to work you have to use Firefox. We should be way past that point by now! The whole point of the universality of the Web would be to not have those kind of distinctions, but we’re still living with them. It’s always fascinating to see how long it takes for certain pieces of historical antiquity to die away. The more you put them in the browsers you’ve codified them as eternal, and that’s stupid.
The follow on question was: “Do you see this as a failure of the standards process we have today?”.
The answer from Mr. Geschke was:
Unless there’s an active, vibrant organization who takes ownership of the standard and either polices or makes so easily and readily available the implementation of that standard that no one tries to do it on their own, you don’t have a standard. That’s always the dilemma we dealt with in the early days with PostScript. If the clones had managed to wrest control of PostScript away from us, we would never have gotten to PostScript 3. It would have by that point devolved into a set of incompatibilities that would have made its whole premise pointless.
When I think about these comments in terms of open source search, several questions came to mind:
- Is the underlying foundation of “platform independent” based on control; that is, a file works anywhere as long as one uses the preferred method of a particular outfit?
- How can fragmentation be constrained without limiting innovation; that is, will there be so many versions of an open source solution that complexity undermines benefits of software like Google Android?
- Is the solution a benevolent dictator and not the messiness of the free market; that is, is the approach taken by Apple, to cite one example, the one to make sales to a majority in a market segment because boundaries make good neighbors?
Today powerful companies are working hard to make their solutions the “only acceptable” solution. Some organizations like this approach. IBM is a $100 billion business for this reason. Some consumers like the constraints a brand imposes. Apple controls about one third of North America music sales for a reason.
I have not worked out how open source search and content processing will intersect with the commercial interests of companies like IBM, Google, and Oracle, to name three interesting companies with different open source policies.
Stephen E Arnold, May 26, 2010
Freebie
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