Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Open source drives web 2.0 boom
With the recent interest of venture capitalists in the web companies (e.g. read here, there was one much better article on forbes but I do not recall the URL... In fact there is a lot of info on the web) it is clear they are looking for revenues from so called "Web 2.0" internet - projects that involve online communities on the scale not seen before.
Take for example digg.com - 4m$ in investments, youtube.com - 11m$, wikia.com - 4m$ and many others. The total investments go in hundreds billions of dollars and in the next year or two it will be clear if Web 2.0 = "web revolution" or Web 2.0 = "another web bubble".
Anyway people say it is going to be different now and the mistakes of 90's will not be repeated.
In fact I did not want to talk about economical aspects of the web, but rather about software and tools. What in 90's you had to buy for thousands dollars today open source world offers for free and with the quality it is sometimes difficult to find in the commercial products.
The wikdot.com budget states 0.00 $ (zero dollars) for the software. All the development is done using Linux + eclipse + apache software + PHP + postgresql + tons of other free software. The whole list would make it too long to mention here but for sure it will appear on the final "credits" page of the project. It is not really amazing that the software is free - one can find a lot of free soft out there - but the quality is what matters. I could not find anything better that eclipse for IDE, apache httpd for a web server. Postgresql is an awesome database - IMHO the best of the open-source ones. Although not much feature-rich as Oracle, but who can afford Oracle ;-)
For production servers there is also 0.00 $. The final farm will run on Linux boxes probably with the Ultra Monkey-related software for high reliability.
In this context it may appear true that (and this is the conclusion of this post)
you can build great professional software with ZERO software costs!!!
And this is great. Not just because you "save money". This is great because "zero software costs" gives a big opportunity for people with great ideas and not necessarily with big wallets.
At some level the price is not the only factor that matters. I am talking about programming libraries. In the last 10 years the number of open source code has increased enormously. In PHP which we use we can find tons of software we use in our projects - just to mention PEAR packages or Smarty template engine. As for JavaScript there are tons of good libraries - e.g. the recent YahooUI, Prototype, MooFX and many others. Using them you save a lot of effort and time.
To conclude for now - the "garage develpment" times are back. They are back as never before.
watch us ;-)
Michal
BTW: Ok, I have lied a bit. We need a copy of Windows to ensure wikidot works with "the most popular browser". But this came bundled with one of the laptops ;-)
Take for example digg.com - 4m$ in investments, youtube.com - 11m$, wikia.com - 4m$ and many others. The total investments go in hundreds billions of dollars and in the next year or two it will be clear if Web 2.0 = "web revolution" or Web 2.0 = "another web bubble".
Anyway people say it is going to be different now and the mistakes of 90's will not be repeated.
In fact I did not want to talk about economical aspects of the web, but rather about software and tools. What in 90's you had to buy for thousands dollars today open source world offers for free and with the quality it is sometimes difficult to find in the commercial products.
The wikdot.com budget states 0.00 $ (zero dollars) for the software. All the development is done using Linux + eclipse + apache software + PHP + postgresql + tons of other free software. The whole list would make it too long to mention here but for sure it will appear on the final "credits" page of the project. It is not really amazing that the software is free - one can find a lot of free soft out there - but the quality is what matters. I could not find anything better that eclipse for IDE, apache httpd for a web server. Postgresql is an awesome database - IMHO the best of the open-source ones. Although not much feature-rich as Oracle, but who can afford Oracle ;-)
For production servers there is also 0.00 $. The final farm will run on Linux boxes probably with the Ultra Monkey-related software for high reliability.
In this context it may appear true that (and this is the conclusion of this post)
you can build great professional software with ZERO software costs!!!
And this is great. Not just because you "save money". This is great because "zero software costs" gives a big opportunity for people with great ideas and not necessarily with big wallets.
At some level the price is not the only factor that matters. I am talking about programming libraries. In the last 10 years the number of open source code has increased enormously. In PHP which we use we can find tons of software we use in our projects - just to mention PEAR packages or Smarty template engine. As for JavaScript there are tons of good libraries - e.g. the recent YahooUI, Prototype, MooFX and many others. Using them you save a lot of effort and time.
To conclude for now - the "garage develpment" times are back. They are back as never before.
watch us ;-)
Michal
BTW: Ok, I have lied a bit. We need a copy of Windows to ensure wikidot works with "the most popular browser". But this came bundled with one of the laptops ;-)
Comments:
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No, you don't need a Windows copy.
You can visit an internet caffee to check if everything is working OK:)
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You can visit an internet caffee to check if everything is working OK:)
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: 12:38 PM
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