Tonight Julie blogged Luke Timmerman's article in yesterday's Seattle Times: Progress, not profit: Nonprofit biotech research groups grow in size, influence, which is about the rise of non profit organizations as driving forces in Seattle's biotech industry.

In software, we are starting to see some similar ideas. We have some foundations: the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the Mozilla Foundation (MF), the Open Software Applications Foundation (OSAF), the Python Software Foundation (PSF), and the Jabber Foundation (JF) come easily to mind. The foundations vary. OSAF and MF are actually supporting staff to work on their projects (I think FSF is doing some of thus but not as much). The ASF and PSF are not doing this -- the ASF does have companies contributing developers but that's not quite the same, and Guido van Rossum has to keep changing day jobs to put food on the table.

Could such an idea work for software? It will be interesting to watch the OSAF and MF over the next few years. In software, we have a culture of "he who has the idea should get rich off it". But that also leads to short term thinking about many of the problems that we are facing. Is this article pre-figuring the future of software foundations?

• FeedDemon Beta3a which now can open all links in an external browser!
• Ruby 1.8.0
• PyDev 0.1 Initial release of Python plugin for Eclispe - by Aleks Totic

First, wikis don't suggest refinements (other categories which could be intersected with the current category in order to narrow the search). Second, wikis don't do hierarchical categories. The combination of both of these features enables a qualitatively different kind of site.

The misnomer of having a company to yell at when things go wrong seems to be widely held. After you've yelled at them, what do you next? The software you are using is still not fit for purpose and you've got to wait for the next release, if not forever.

With closed source software, if things turn against you (your business changing, your understanding of the software being deficient), all you have is superstition to back you up. 'Maybe they'll fix it in the next release, and it will be worth what I paid for it.' - Maybe.