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The path for "Hijacking 'open'" sounds an awful lot like "building better software faster." Can we get more people to "hijack 'open'"? Can "'open' hijackers" b

The path for "Hijacking 'open'" sounds an awful lot like "building better software faster." Can we get more people to "hijack 'open'"? Can "'open' hijackers" become the new "rockstar developers?"

int_19h 10y ago
It all depends on your definition of "better", and particularly on whether it includes "open" and "interoperable", and to what extent.
- fixermark 10y ago
  "Does it work?" is generally the definition I use.
  - int_19h 10y ago
    A lot of people do. But some of us find it frustrating when, later down the line, we want to switch the service provider (of whatever the service is), only to find out the massive amount of lock-in around their services/software making it a massive pain - and as a result, we have to contend with the relatively more minor pain that prompted the desire to switch in the first place. E.g. in retrospect, I wish I never bought into the Google ecosystem as much as I did, convenient though as it was. There are parts of it that I dislike or outright hate now, but the inconvenience of switching away is greater (yes, I've tried), so now I mostly just grumble quietly.
    - fixermark 10y ago
      I used to feel similarly about the Windows software ecosystem. Then I spent about a decade and a half trying to embrace alternatives and I concluded that software that handles general use cases is actually a hard, specialized-skillset problem, and there's a lot of benefit to the full-stack control (and large developer culture, and multi-decade legacy history of successful product) that a long-legacy monoculture provides. Most of the friction is in wanting to use something that isn't in your monoculture, and trying to solve that by building a more general solution really just adds another monoculture to be incompatible with your favorite one (see https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/). Virtualization has basically solved that rare problem in my use-case. To each their own, of course; I got bored with the game of making the computer architecture work over paying someone else to do that and then using the computer to make things.

The path for "Hijacking 'open'" sounds an awful lot like "building better software faster." Can we get more people to "hijack 'open'"? Can "'open' hijackers" become the new "rockstar developers?"

int_19h 10y ago

It all depends on your definition of "better", and particularly on whether it includes "open" and "interoperable", and to what extent.

fixermark 10y ago
"Does it work?" is generally the definition I use.
- int_19h 10y ago
  A lot of people do. But some of us find it frustrating when, later down the line, we want to switch the service provider (of whatever the service is), only to find out the massive amount of lock-in around their services/software making it a massive pain - and as a result, we have to contend with the relatively more minor pain that prompted the desire to switch in the first place. E.g. in retrospect, I wish I never bought into the Google ecosystem as much as I did, convenient though as it was. There are parts of it that I dislike or outright hate now, but the inconvenience of switching away is greater (yes, I've tried), so now I mostly just grumble quietly.
  - fixermark 10y ago
    I used to feel similarly about the Windows software ecosystem. Then I spent about a decade and a half trying to embrace alternatives and I concluded that software that handles general use cases is actually a hard, specialized-skillset problem, and there's a lot of benefit to the full-stack control (and large developer culture, and multi-decade legacy history of successful product) that a long-legacy monoculture provides. Most of the friction is in wanting to use something that isn't in your monoculture, and trying to solve that by building a more general solution really just adds another monoculture to be incompatible with your favorite one (see https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/). Virtualization has basically solved that rare problem in my use-case. To each their own, of course; I got bored with the game of making the computer architecture work over paying someone else to do that and then using the computer to make things.