I guess the key question for me, is whether enough of audience for Watson are developers that are willing to contribute to it, or are they mostly consumers? Ie. is there enough grassroots effort to support it?
Despite having a small part in the java.net launch, I don't follow closely the open source world. Yeah, I of course I use software from open source projects (bugzilla rules!) and I follow some of the news. I even started reading the book "The Bazaar". But I'm not deep into it. So much of my job is worrying about keeping servers stable and interpreting marketing requests rather than doing cool technical work. I started wondering about how opensourcing Alameda would change the business model. The answer I came to, is not very much. Here is how I think it would work, you give the client away for free, although maybe at some point a distributor will charge for packaging it with doc & support. It comes with some channels for free, but others have to be paid for (especially if the matching backend service charges), probably on a subscription basis. Often there is a choice between HTML scraping for free (breaks easily) and accessing feeds/webservices for a price.
Word is that, glow (cool calendar Swing app) might be open sourced too.
Kathy
