Yesterday, I got passed the June edition of Linux Magazine. Carsten Schnober writes an article commenting on an article on Roy Fielding's home page. The article is otherwise fine but it includes this statement from Schnober:

"In the past, talented programmers would collaborate on developing software in their free time, often producing results that put their commercial competitors to shame, but this age seems to be passing."

Source: Carsten Schnober, Projects on the move, "Linux Magazine", Issue 91, June 2008, Page 94

While it is true that many of the early 1990s free software/open source trail-blazers have grown old and/or rich and their software projects are becoming part of the corporate mainstream.

However, the amount of people working on Free Software/ Open Source software now is at least one order of magnitude larger than it was in the 1990s. These new people are also from far more diverse backgrounds and at least one order of magnitude smarter too. A lot the important stuff happening is not necessarily happening in America, and is not necessarily happening in the English language. More importantly, it is far more specialised.

We already have a lot of the obvious big things, we have C compilers (e.g. GCC, first release 1987), we have kernels (e.g. Linux kernel, first release 1991), we have graphical toolkits (e.g. GTK2, first release 2002), we have HTTP Servers (e.g. Apache, first released 1995), SQL databases (e.g. MySQL, first released 1995) and Virtual Learning Environments (e.g. Moodle, released 2001).

Today's free/open source community are now not just playing catch-up but are going in its own directions, places that proprietary software has not. Which of these explorations will be successful I have no idea. But recent successes of the free/open source world include famous things such as package management (the fact that you can automatically download 20,000 stable malware free software packages at the click of a mouse), modern dynamic languages and web frameworks, through to things like XBMC, which allows you to recycle your old Xbox into a fantastic media centre, and OpenStreetMap which will soon have the best non-governmental map data in the UK.

Even more important are all the tiny projects in the long tail, the application that allows your wife/girlfriend to automatically sync a shopping list into your phone, or the application that allows you to export all emails in your gmail that include certain keywords into a file, e.g. an automatically generated list of everyone who has responded to your party invitation. These small projects that provide one incremental improvement are the majority of free/open source projects. Such projects don't have marketing departments or PR managers.

Fielding's original article was about how Tech Journalism lagged behind an event by a least a week, in other cases it can be years. Journalism covers the free/open source community poorly because they are covering it from a distance.

New ideas emerge in branches in version control systems, in IRC channels, development conferences and on mailing lists. By the time a technology gets into corporate press releases and corporate conferences, it is years old and the brightest minds in the free/open source community have long moved on. Many tech publications do little in the way of investigative journalism, they just re-post, re-write and re-hash whatever comes into their RSS feeds.

Outside of the mainstream tech press, you have people who self identify as free software journalists, embedded journalists, if you will. Hopefully, they are getting paid but they are very much on the fringes of the journalistic scene,

In the last episode of Lugradio, they discussed what they called tech "pundits". By this I would understand people who make their living from writing about the broad picture, people such as John Dvorak (I hate initialising middle letters),

In a church shared lunch, there will be various offerings. Some dishes are a work of beauty and worship that some lady has slaved over. Some are perfectly fine fillers that help to bulk out the lunch, e.g. salad, potatoes or rice. Others are off-the-shelf products that were hastily bought on the to church in by a single man. The occasional dish is worth avoiding entirely and will be subtly moved behind something else in a larger container.

Reading a pundit like John Dvorak, is like surviving a church shared lunch. Some articles are a revelation, some are interesting enough as far as they go, and some are obvious howlers. The main thing is to have a good time while you are there.