Sustainable Open Source Web Development

Just a thought...

What if Google would have been an Open Source company ? What if they would have been serious about being liberal towards their own copyrights and patents, instead of just those of content-providers ;-), and were also [organizing] the code-part of [the world's information] on search-engine technology [and making it universally accessible and useful] ?, in short: what if it was an Open company ?

It would have been a different world...

But not necessarily an impossible one in organizational terms, as appears from the article [Merging corporations with co-ops and open source]. Where a co-op with the properties of a corporation is proposed to be legally feasible in Canada.

Nor is it an impossible world in the legal sense, as [GPL v3], point 7b4 makes it possible to require derived works running on a web-host to make their (modified) source available (LogiLogiManta makes use of this).

Nor would it have been a world in which less people involved with hands-on creating the technology would have earned, or would have earned less... At least that's what I think. Without proof a weak link I admit... Still even without this link, freedom and self-determination are more important than wealth, certainly beyond a certain threshold.

But what if an open-source co-operative would not leave visitors of their development-site with just a tarball of source, and an INSTALL.txt file, but would also offer services around it ? The most obvious service being hosting timely updated, running copies of it on their servers ? Either financed by a fee, or by advertising, or either at the user's picking ? [SourceForge.net] is a working example of this strategy.

And what about the practical part ? Is the web heading for monolithic site-complexes like Google.com that take care of everything ?: The so called [million dollar code, or million users approach] ? I think not. Web 2.0 is towards smaller tools that do less, but do it better. And thus the web can be Open Source.

The web-world as it is, is one in which there are still many fronteers to be explored...