I've long dreamed of a resurgence in the open source community, attacking big media much as the community attacked Microsoft in the late 1990s. It's depressing that the PR machine has so thoroughly succeeded that most of those who still call themselves "geeks" now consider building throwaway hacks on big media services cooler and more meaningful than coordinated efforts to replace the services themselves (in the name of serving some ideals much greater than say, amateur entrepreneurialism).
Talking here about Docs, Gmail and so on. Somehow it became embarrassing for a nerd to straight out clone the competition, much like AbiWord and suchlike once did, simply in the name of freedom. Nowadays we have to compete on "sexy" innovative site designs and related sundry crap, and how many cloud "services" we integrate with.
I'll keep hoping for this resurgence, in the meantime I'll continue privately working toward cloning some of these services myself, until such a time as there is an established community for me to join. We basically need something like the (early day) GNOME foundation, but for the web.
Talking here about Docs, Gmail and so on. Somehow it became embarrassing for a nerd to straight out clone the competition, much like AbiWord and suchlike once did, simply in the name of freedom. Nowadays we have to compete on "sexy" innovative site designs and related sundry crap, and how many cloud "services" we integrate with.
I'll keep hoping for this resurgence, in the meantime I'll continue privately working toward cloning some of these services myself, until such a time as there is an established community for me to join. We basically need something like the (early day) GNOME foundation, but for the web.