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Thanks for the comment. I agree that in practice more developers don't equal more productivity. And I agree that things happen better in small teams. But I stil

Thanks for the comment. I agree that in practice more developers don't equal more productivity. And I agree that things happen better in small teams. But I still don't see the point of not talking to each other, and learning from each other. One reason I suggested what I suggested is this: If you just run some one else's Linux applications on linux boxes, and call it a personal data store, you have a bunch of problems to solve: 1. No cohesion in UIs 2. No cohesion in APIs 3. A crappy user experience. 4. Code Maintenance As soon as you think of solving these problems, you'll see the problem of scale, of the number of programmers needed to do things (both frontend and backend). I still think that the people interested in this should talk to each other(, and perhaps try a divide and conquer approach -- whenever possible), compared to just trying to patch each other's code to make it work in a small team. I hope you agree, that this is not an easy problem to solve technically. At least I think so.

kentonv 12y ago
I think all of the problems you bring up are indeed hard problems, and important ones to work on, but they are also problems that exist already, in the current ecosystem of open source web apps, and even often in proprietary apps. About the only way you get "cohesion" on the web today is by limiting yourself entirely to services from one company (Apple; Google), and even then it's far from seamless. Yet, somehow we make progress. So our goal is not to solve these problems, but to incrementally improve the state of the world. Clearly, the first thing that needs to happen in order for open source and decentralized web apps to be viable is there has to be a way that common, non-technical users can actually use them. Sandstorm is trying to offer a solution for that, and we think we're pretty close. As much as possible, we actually try to stay out of the question of UI or API standards. IMO that's a problem that can only be solved organically.

kentonv 12y ago

I think all of the problems you bring up are indeed hard problems, and important ones to work on, but they are also problems that exist already, in the current ecosystem of open source web apps, and even often in proprietary apps. About the only way you get "cohesion" on the web today is by limiting yourself entirely to services from one company (Apple; Google), and even then it's far from seamless. Yet, somehow we make progress. So our goal is not to solve these problems, but to incrementally improve the state of the world. Clearly, the first thing that needs to happen in order for open source and decentralized web apps to be viable is there has to be a way that common, non-technical users can actually use them. Sandstorm is trying to offer a solution for that, and we think we're pretty close. As much as possible, we actually try to stay out of the question of UI or API standards. IMO that's a problem that can only be solved organically.