Extropia.com: A Case Study in Open Source Software
December 28, 1998
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It is hard to pick up an industry rag these days without reading about
the "Open Source" business and software development revolution.
Following the funding of RED HAT by Netscape and Sun, the creation of
Scriptix (out of TCL), and the Microsoft "Halloween" document, this
article hopes to explain what the Open Source model is all about by
reviewing the development of one Open Source Software Shop, Extropia.
Written as a case study, this article attempts to give the reader an
ethnographic feel for how this model changes life on the web!
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Year Endings and Beginnings
For the last year, I have been putting out tutorial after
tutorial for this WebWare column. In fact, looking back over the
year, I am quite happy with the breadth of topics that I
have been able to cover.
In fact, I feel confident that anyone could happen upon
WebWare, stay and read for a few weeks, and leave with the
majority of skills necessary to become a great web technician.
However, what I have not discussed so far are large scale
positioning and architectural issues which draw all of the
many skills of a webtechnician and produce a website. I
have not talked on the level of the webmaster!
In these last few weeks of this year, and in the first few
weeks of next year, I would like to give you an idea of
how I understand the experience of webmastering and
web application development through my own experiences.
I would like to talk to you about
Extropia, my "Open Source"
company. I would like to share with you a little bit
about how the web applications development market has had profound
impact on how I design code and how I look at the web.
In particular I will talk about why I came to believe in the Open Source
Development model and why I changed my style of coding over the
years in order to support that model.
I hope that this "case study" will give you an "intuition" about
using code far more than any technical reference could.
Regardless, happy holidays to all!
Contents:
Extropia.com: A Case Study in Open Source Software
Extropia.com: A Case Study in Open Source Software
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