OSS Watch team blog

The initial flurry of activity over open social is over. Now people can settle down and consider its merits and its warts. This very topic came up yesterday in a session I ran on open development at UKOLN. We discussed isues such as what makes it a standard? and what makes it open?

The initial open social partners will have us believe that it is a standard because they say it is one (a de facto standard). They also tell us it is open because anyone can implement it. But why should we listen? How can we influence its design?

The people behind open social are not stupid. They are also realistic enough to know that open social will only become a genuine de facto standard if it is used beyond the initial group. The easier it is to implement the more likely it is to be used, the more it is used the more “standard” it becomes.

Accordingly, Ning have offered to donate their implementation of open social, complete with an initial set of committers to support it, to the Apache Incubator. Assuming the project is accepted this will result in an easy route to implementation for almost any project.

So that’s initial take-up pretty well sorted then (unless the users think open social is a bad idea of course). What about the “open” part?

The ASF has a history of managing reference implementations of standards and of protecting users in standards definition processes. They are often held in high regard for this important work. I hope this means that the open social partners are going to allow the ASF to create a valid user community around open social. That is a community with a voice and an ability to influence the standard.
Lets see what smart developers can do with this. If you want to turn your project into a container you probably want to save yourself lots of effort and wait for the Ning donation to hit the Apache Incubator.