[via InfoWorld]
Tim Bray (Wikipedia, Blog) was interviewed by InfoWorld this week. Wow, *very* interesting inputs about Open Source, XML, RSS, and his understanding of the Software-Industry. Worth a read!
About Tim Bray
Tim Bray is director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems, but is perhaps best known as a co-inventor of XML. He also has launched one of the first public Web search engines, Open Text Index, and founded Antarctica Systems, specializing in visualization-based business analytics. Additionally, Bray publishes a blog and co-chairs the IETF AtomPub (Atom Publishing Format and Publishing Protocol) Working Group, which is focused on technologies for editing Web resources such as blogs and wikis.
About Open Source
the different kinds of business models you have around software are not specifically a function of whether it’s open source or closed source. I think even if you wanted to do traditional capital cost software licensing, the kind of thing that Oracle still makes a living on, there’s no reason in principle you couldn’t do that and still have the product [be] open source and anybody could download it and compile themselves. […]
Open source is a good characteristic for software in general to have. It seems like we’re all beginning to agree, and our plans for making money from software do include open source by and large. […]
Q: Can you make money just selling support without taking any money for the software itself?
A: Well, we think so. Yes. Absolutely.
The historical model of trying to make your money by software [rights] to use licensing costs, I really do think that’s going to become increasingly unsustainable. Trying to cause people to pay money for something that is duplicated and the cost is zero, is at some level profoundly unnatural. And another issue that has always bothered me as a person who’s been not just a technologist but a business executive, software licensing tends to produce some profoundly bad accounting. […]
So the question of how you would maximize the revenue for the competitive marketplace is one I don’t think we know the answer to yet. We’re betting that closed source is sufficiently unnatural in the long haul, that open source is the way it’s going to end up.
About XML
And so the population of people in the world who actually knew SGML and understood the Web was maybe 12 people. So that was the 12 people that ended up on the working group, and I co-edited the specs. I’m a co-editor of XML 1.0. And we basically took SGML, threw away the 90 percent that nobody ever used, made it a little bit more Web-friendly, addressed things with URLs, and that was XML. […]
Has [XML] exceeded our expectations? Oh, my goodness, yes. We thought we were building something that would enable somewhat more efficient publishing of Web pages to multiple devices and so on, and the explosion of creativity and energy around XML has wildly exceeded anything we could have possibly dreamed.
About RSS
The world’s most successful XML application right at the moment is RSS. In terms of the volume of data, the number of feeds, and that is a huge source of change, not just on the technology front, but also culturally. The notion that we have a communication commons where anybody can write and there are no gatekeepers.