Our visit to OSCON last week exposed the rift between Web 2.0 (a.k.a Software as a Service) and open source. There’s an excellent roundup here. It’s short reading and hits the high points well.
Effectively, Web 2.0 lets you reap all the benefits of free and open source software (FOSS), without advancing FOSS. Smart people currently sit on bothsides of the issue, but for the foreseeable future, the “SaaS loophole” will remain.
Both Scott and I will be at OSCON 2007 in Portland and we would be more than happy to meet up with folks. We’ll doing a variety of Q/A focused meetings as well as some video interviews while we are there and we’re happy to schedule more with folks who are interested.