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Comment by regis | Hacker News Reader

Why are people so interested in recreating a 'more open X' (where X is something like dropbox, skype etc...)? When these people could actually be iterating on these ideas and creating something different. Is it because there is lots of money/publicity surrounding this new found interest in "openness" or do these people actually believe that this is the most important thing to be working on? I am just trying to imagine what kind of new openness we could create if we began thinking outside of the framework that current applications provide already.

This is not not to say that they're not doing enough, but it's just a question that's been bouncing around in my head lately.

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Here's my take on why open standards matter (from March '12):

http://www.onebigfluke.com/2012/03/diversity-powers-growth-w...

- Open standards are important because they promote competition and diversity.

- The opportunities of today exist because someone in the past thought about the long term.

- Open standards are an investment in our collective future.

I totally agree, this isn't necessarily about the projects listed in the article. It is more of a reaction against the over abundance of announcements like "it's like X but open!" without really providing any significant openness over google drive or whatever it's attempting to replace.

After checking out the projects mentioned in the article I would definitely say that they don't fall into this category.

> Why are people so interested in recreating a 'more open X'

To me, the biggest benefit is avoiding the problem of orphaned products.

Think about the problems caused by the shutoff of a major web service, for example, Google Reader. Reader users relied on a unique service provided by a company. When the company decided for whatever reason to discontinue the service, those users were left high and dry.

If you use a self-hostable version that runs on a commodity technology stack (i.e. the underlying OS/webserver/Redis/whatever layers are offered by many different providers and/or self-hostable), you can be pretty sure you'll be able to retire the service on your schedule, not the provider's.

If the product is open-source, this is even better because it makes the code more resistant to "bit-rot" (the tendency of code to stop working even though no changes are made, due to changes in lower layers.)

Openness helps people who aren't ready to reimplement the whole thing try to iterate their idea on top of what already exists, rather than doing the 98% of the work that is the same as the other product plus the even harder 2% brand new concept work.

Camlistore is "like Dropbox" only for the purpose of a Wired article. In fact it is one of the most exciting projects around on the internet today.

It is a little like Bittorrent. When Bittorrent first came out there was a large community who were most excited about it because "it was open" - both open source and open in the sense it didn't require servers.

Has that "openness" been important to the success of Bittorrent? Perhaps, but most people now talk about more specific qualities: the fact it resists legal attack and the high downloads speeds that can be obtained without paying for bandwidth. Some of these are actually what people meant when they spoke of "openness" initially.

So "open"="nice", but discussion of specific qualities of that that means is much more important.

I'd note that "open" is only mentioned once on http://camlistore.org/, and that is a very specific quality ("Open Source" - not some general "open" principle).

I agree that we would do well to think completely outside the existing framework of services. Under present circumstances openness has moved to the forefront of peoples' thinking in lieu of imagining more fundamental changes. This is probably a good thing, but even better would be building completely new and open tools and services.

why isn't the iteration/improvement part making it open? i don't see the dichotomy.

I'd imagine it's not seen as an improvement because (most) people don't value it.

You might as well say you're improving a service by localizing a service for Esperanto. To some (small) audience, that well may be an improvement. But most people are going to wonder why you're 'wasting' that time.

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