Dave Winer was quick to take me to task for leaving the small commercial developers out of the pickin’ cotton for Bill piece. He even drew us a picture a month ago. His point is that media coverage about the software industry invariably break down to Microsoft v. open source. What about the little guys, like Dave’s company, UserLand?
Well, he’s right, of course. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about small software developers. I use a lot of their software. I’d be dead in the water without Dantz Retrospect, Opera, SmartFTP, and a bunch of others. Even after nearly two years of using Windows, I still miss a lot of great software on the Mac, most specifically BBEdit.
Great software comes from small developers. Programs I live in every day—Photoshop, Visio, FrameMaker, and Microsoft Word—all came from small developers initially. In fact, I’d venture that all really great software came from small teams or individuals. Remember ThinkTank and MORE? Those were Winer products. How about FactFinder and the original FileMaker? How about WriteNow?
This web server is run on open source software (Zope and Squishdot), both of which are evolving products with their share of bugs. I find it quite difficult to complain about problems with open source software to which I have contributed nothing. I’m not a programmer and I have no intention of becoming one. I learned that lesson almost 20 years ago when a much younger friend of mine was able to code in Assembler, do remote work for Cray over a 300 baud modem, eat a cupcake, and carry on a conversation with me about keeping a penguin as a pet in Minnesota simultaneously.
No, I don’t want to be a programmer. So I can’t help with open source software except as a writer, editor, usability expert, or project manager. And that’s not the same as coding, so I’d still feel uncomfortable carping about bugs.
Large organizations are the perfect environment for open source. They have armies of people who are proficient with a variety of programming languages and can keep software running efficiently without much problem. But small businesses can’t afford a staff of geeks, let alone the cupcakes they consume. And maybe—just maybe—that’s the Achilles’ heel of open source. So maybe we’re better off with innovative software from the small commercial developers.
And Dave’s right; next year his open source picture is going to look a lot different.
So the question is, how do we support the small commercial developers outside of and in addition to giving them lots of papers with pictures of dead presidents?
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