On no, is there an OS tech bubble looming around the corner, ready to burst on some unsuspecting souls? Maybe P.T. Barnum was right.
Shades of 1999! I met a venture capitalist who told me lovingly about his "early round of financing" for a company that had a nice-sounding idea behind it but didn’t yet have either a domain name or working code. Then I met another VC with a similar story. And another. And I saw business cards exchanged to the tune of buzzwords I thought had died in the dot-com crash, plus a bunch of new ones that have popped up since then.
I thought giddily for a minute that I should run to the Office Depot across the street from the Argent Hotel (where the conference is being held) and grab some blank CDs. I could then come back to my room and make a slide presentation for a business that would develop a VoIP-based multimedia wiki that would track disintermediated community-generated podcast blog reviews. It would be based on open source software, of course. And cross-platform. And extensible and highly scalable.The above quote is from NewsForge reporting on the current Web 2.0 conference. I somehow thought that open source was going to be a little bit different, but we seem to be rapidly climbing the hype curve. I also thought that 2006 would be the year that OS goes mainstream, but it’s getting a lot of press now.
I thought giddily for a minute that I should run to the Office Depot across the street from the Argent Hotel (where the conference is being held) and grab some blank CDs. I could then come back to my room and make a slide presentation for a business that would develop a VoIP-based multimedia wiki that would track disintermediated community-generated podcast blog reviews. It would be based on open source software, of course. And cross-platform. And extensible and highly scalable.The above quote is from NewsForge reporting on the current Web 2.0 conference. I somehow thought that open source was going to be a little bit different, but we seem to be rapidly climbing the hype curve. I also thought that 2006 would be the year that OS goes mainstream, but it’s getting a lot of press now.
As much as I may be an open source evangelist, I promise not to get caught up in the hype. Open source to me means not only good, cheap software for the masses but is a foundation that enables smaller businesses to compete and survive against the multinationals. OS is not the answer to all of our problems, nor is it the best way to get rich quick, though there are people making money on it. Let’s just use some common sense when we talk about open source.
