newspeak

Joyent makes Node.js and is deeply involved in both cloud and open source work. It also has brilliant people–Bryan Cantrill (CTO), a friend from Sun, being just one. But what is interesting to me about this good interview by Jennifer Cloer, is that Hammond very powerfully represents why Joyent is using open source and community processes and why open source is now the preferred path for cloud infrastructure–and probably for a lot of other work. That leaves all that the consumer actually sees and uses, what used to be the desktop but now may be no more than a series of apps, proprietary. Is that likely to change? I doubt it. User interfaces, and user experience design is neither easy nor cheap; investing in it is risky and though refining a UI can certainly be collaborative, and invariably is, initiating it is about as collaborative as for any aesthetic work. It probably doesn’t *need* to be that way but “we” like it that way, where “we” is that body of people buying, say, Apple products, though this could be extended.

Somewhere in my archives I wrote most of an essay working through the subjects available for open source collaboration–and the ones that, for one reason or another, are not. Time to revisit it.

via Special Exclusive: Q&A with Joyent CEO Scott Hammond | Linux.com.