The Web Can Be Open Source

Web 2.0 is all about social software. It also centers around services that only do one or a few things, but do them well. The possibility to link them together through API's (RSS in blogs for example, PayPal's API, and even [further AJAX-ification]), and thus to build upon them is the magic here.

This sounds astoundingly similar to the [unix philosophy]: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Now there is one famous cluster of Open Source projects that is very successful in such an environment, it's the operating system that I use all the time, and as you can guess it's called the [GNU/Linux system].

Now we all know Google, and their use of open API's ([google maps], [google data]), and the beautiful things that are done thanks to these API's (like [EveryTrail]). And people at Google have even plans to take this process of openness further [as stated here]...

The point they seem to skip however, is the Open Source bit of Open. Google apps are only open in that they have an opening to put things into them, or to get things out of them. In this sense even Windows is open. Of course it goes a bit too far to call Google the Microsoft of the web, but there is an issue here:

The Web can be Open Source. Besides the [million dollar markup approach] of the Semantic Web, the million dollar code approach of Google, and the [million users approach] of Wikipedia, there can be the million services approach of the unix philosophy for the web.

So let's make it happen.