My thinking lies somewhere in the middle. For all the noise that is being made about open source, we are still at the beginning of understanding what it is all about, how to organize it, and how to make a living off of it. Jon Udell's post about fit and finish can't be ignored. The open source community is still experimenting with different ways to organize itself. The organization of Linux, the FSF, the ASF, and JBoss are all different. It's not clear yet that there's a really good model for this. Just look at the discussions that we at the ASF are having this week regarding membership (which is related to how the ASF is structured). There's a lot more room for experimentation around many aspects of open source.

I'm an open source guy, but I also feel an affinity towards small developers -- must be all those years on the Macintosh, where the best apps were done by the small shops. The entire fabric of the software industry is changing, but that doesn't mean that there's no future. I don't believe that open source means that people doing software don't make a living. I do believe that it means we have to do it differently than we've done it before.

One last thought on this from Cory Doctorow's notes on Tim O'Reilly's Reboot talk (via Sam)

What keeps me up at night?

...

* Users don't own their data -- who cares about source when your data is locked in?

The WWDC is running, and Panther and the G5 are no longer vapor. (Where's that 15" G5 Powerbook?!)

I have to say that the Mac developer community is where the buzz is. I was totally bored reading the various Java One blogs this year, but a couple of the blog posts from MacHack just stirred the envy in me.

Eric Albert recounted the increase in Rendezvous usage. This stuff is very cool. I don't get why we aren't seeing more activity on Windows and Linux. Looks like a good opportunity for a small developer. Oh, wait, Microsoft and open source have exterminated all of those.

James has the most amazing journey. Somehow he manages to score a ton of old NeXT hardware. I was excited by the Lisp Machine that was on eBay last week, except that it had no display or keyboard. That and the fact that I have nowhere to put something that big.

Sometime today the reality distortion field will wear off. Till then I'm waffling over whether my next machine is a Mac or not.