Open Source Alameda?

Saw an email from one of the folks that works on java.net. He got an inquiry about open-sourcing Alameda and was asking about the idea. The powers to be are pondering that one, and I don't have much insight into their decision-making, but it is an interesting idea.

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

Posted on: Aug 15, 2004

Posted by: KitchenSink

Category: archive

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Comments:

I've been a loyal Watson user since day one and am looking forward to the new tool from Sun (whose products I've used almost as long as I've used Macs!). I think open-sourcing the project is a great idea, or at least open-sourcing the plugins. I haven't investigated how Watson plugins work, but I think the user community would be happy to contribute to the task of updating the HTML parsing (if you use the scraping model). It would be nice to see if there is more interest in the community since I can only speak for myself. While I do have a fair bit of programming experience, it has all been for astronomical data analysis, so maybe not so relevant to the task at hand. ;-)

Posted by Roy on September 04, 2004 at 04:09 PM PDT #

"I started wondering about how opensourcing Alameda would change the business model. The answer I came to, is not very much."

I think you're right on the money there. No reason not to keep this top-rate desktop app running. There's really not that much that a developer force would have to do if the app were released, assuming it's working fairly well now. Plug-ins are what make the application powerful, and those just need a great foundation from which to be run. Even if many of the now-default plugins were scrapped by the open source community, you know they'd be replaced by something a bit geekier just to show how powerful the app could be (ie, we'll scrape /. instead of bring you the weather out of the box).

It'll be a shame if Sun doesn't bring Alameda to life. It's a first-rate idea and tool, and Sun really needs to be doing more to promote Java on the desktop. This done right, perhaps more than any other app I've heard of (short of Limewire) would do just that.

Posted by R Bailey on October 02, 2004 at 05:24 PM PDT #

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