Google released Google Mashup Editor today, which is an online IDE in the spirit of Forkolator. Google Docs is pretty similar to a design I had been playing with too. I guess Google and I have similar goals. The difference is, they implement their ideas, and I often just blog about mine.
But I’m getting a little scared. Google building a great, functional platform that’s going to entice a lot of people to spend the bulk of their time in Google software. But when we use Google products, we have no control over the software we’re using. We can’t change it. We can’t even prevent it from changing. Google has the keys to the car.
As a free software advocate, that’s scary.
As a user, it should be scary too. Yes, Google seems altruistic enough, but the fact is, they have interests. Often their interests align with the interests of many users, but what if you’re in the 5% whose interests are not being served? Your only option is to choose another product. Maybe find something from Yahoo or Microsoft.
But that’s not good enough for me.
And that’s why Forkolator is still important, even in the face of Yahoo Pipes, Microsoft Popfly and Google Mashup Editor. Forkolator is about giving people total control over the software they use, and encouraging uninhibited exploration of possibilities. Microsoft actively constrains our freedom to change our software. At best, Google is granting us a few limited freedoms because they’ve deemed those freedoms useful to some large segment of their user base. And because in this case, GME drives more traffic to their services.
Despite this minor detour towards proprietary software, I really believe the future of software is total Freedom. But for that to be true, we need to build infrastructure to compete with Google and we need to do it fast.
Really interesting thoughts.
I just want to make sure everyone knows that we at Google stand behind the open source community and free use of software. In fact all of the source files created with the Google Mashup Editor are hosted using the open source project hosting feature of Google Code and therefore are open source. We also hope to open source our framework at some point in the future to enable developers to contribute to it and extension it in ways they see fit.
We’d love to hear suggestions on how we can improve our efforts to support open source and free use of software. Send us your feedback in our developer forum (http://groups.google.com/group/google-mashup-editor) and I promise we’ll respond as quickly as we can.
It’s amazing how you can make me care about free software. The feminism posts make me want to get beers and have a long chat with you. But this stuff, it makes me want to boot up, buckle down, build infrastructure.* That is talent, bro.
W.