Simon, no doubt there are a lot of people who won't (or can't) open up
their CVS repositories. On the other hand, most dotLRN clients (and
dotWRK clients when they exist) could. If someone is deriving a
commercial edge from the systems they have written and they choose not
to release the code that is their decision to make but the truth is
the vast majority of internally developed code provides little or no
competitive advantage.
It is hard to imagine a place where more money is invested in IT and
there are ostensibly more reasons not to share code than in bond trading at
investment banks but there have been quite a few initiatives to pool
code, the biggest example I am aware of being EJV which intended to
build a common infrastructure for managing fixed income securities
data and modeling (and which failed but that is an unrelated story).
Also, openadaptor http://www.openadaptor.org
originally developed by DKW (or whatever it is called now) was open
sourced. It is precisely because the banks end up spending so much
money on building common infrastructure that factoring out what does
not provide competitive advantage and sharing costs is so
appealing.
We are all about communities and collaboration and we have a great
platform from which to launch such an initiative. We should be helping
provide the tools and information to do so. Rather than quoting the
old chestnut ("they can't because it's their competitive advantage")
we should be encouraging people to think very hard about what they can
open up and more importantly what they can contribute back to OpenACS
and lauding the people who take the initiative to do something about
it.
