Chris Messina posted an exploration of the whole open source v. open services conversation. I’m going to respond here in the near future, but wanted to point to it while it’s fresh in my mind.
I have 6 or 7 blog posts waiting to be written, responding to Chris’ post is just one of them. sigh.
In my limited spare time, I’ve recently been hacking on a new web application in Rails. It’s a lifestream app, based on the ideas largely introduced by Jeremy Keith. This app is a basic web app that allows for online source feed management and soon, multiple users.
Through the short development process, I’ve had loads of help from a small group of rails developers on IRC. They’ve been extremely helpful, patient, and willing to dish out a boot-to-the-head from time to time when necessary.
Last week, I had a conversation with one of guys on whose advice and helpful tips I’ve depended on while finding my way around Ruby and Rails. In this conversation he communicated that he was assuming this was an open source project, and wondered if I had a public source control setup somewhere. Now, I do have a public SVN repo setup, for my own use and for the convenience of showing bits of code to folks, but I had not thought about whether this application would be open source or not, so I wasn’t sure how to respond.
Read an early draft of my Personal Platform.
This site is hosted with Dreamhost, probably the best hosting provider I've worked with. They provide an awesome management backend, fantastic deals on hosting, an astonishing amount of bandwidth/disk space, and one-click installs of a *bunch* of common web tools.
