September 15, 2002
Open Sucks is not a Good Answer
Just finished reading through the latest bunch of questions posed to the .org delegation seekers by ICANN staff. One thing popped up that really hit the wrong buttons with me. Proprietary v. Open isn't the real question that needed to be answered here, but simply what RDBMS choices the applicants had made and why (amongst other things). Some of the answers left me scratching my head, most notably the one in which the applicant put forward that they had chosen Oracle because Open software wasn't good enough. Strikes me as being the worst way one could make a decision.
Not only does it make me wonder if they evaluated any other closed RDBMS or not, I can't help but wondering how they will make policy if actually chosen by the board. "We evaluated a number of more liberal dispute resolution policies, but liberal policy sucks, so we stuck with the status quo..."
From Mosaic to Mozilla and back again....
I had similar thoughts to the ones that Jamie had after I tried some of the toys Brett was talking about. I found Feedreader was a reasonable (read: free) first step although Newzcrawler goes much further in the right direction. This kind of talk brings me back to Andreesen's first exuberant vision for the original Mosaic - the browser, the entry point, the portal to the Internet - the client software that made things available in an organized manner.
"...it was a fairly simple application of just pulling the two halves together. The networking works great. The desktop user interface works great. All we really tried to do was to pull them together" - Andreesen, 1995
Hmm...what's taking them so long.