yet hear virtually nothing about Diaspora or Status.Net being used in similar ways to impact the lives of millions of people.
It's because all this software isn't done yet, is severely underfunded, undermanned, outnumbered and outgunned by the proprietary systems.
That isn't stopping any of us from pushing forward, but when the runaway success of our crowd (Diaspora) raised only $200k, to expect that we can immediately compete with the likes of Facebook or Twitter is simply unrealistic. I know we're all doing our best, most of us are volunteers with little to no funding, and we're up against some of the top engineers in the world with billions in venture capital.
But we're all still plugging away. Open source is nothing if not tenacious.
I think the author is missing a connection between the two arguments that he talks about.
Open Source isn't just about self-hosting, but about being able to choose your provider. And the ability to freely choose your provider is dependent on the services on different providers being interoperable.
Also, without a strong Open Source movement, there's no incentive for the closed platforms to interoperate. If anything, there's only disincentives.
As I see it, the only big player with the necessary clout/infrastructure and Open Source credentials and incentives to make the necessary changes is Google.
It's because all this software isn't done yet, is severely underfunded, undermanned, outnumbered and outgunned by the proprietary systems.
That isn't stopping any of us from pushing forward, but when the runaway success of our crowd (Diaspora) raised only $200k, to expect that we can immediately compete with the likes of Facebook or Twitter is simply unrealistic. I know we're all doing our best, most of us are volunteers with little to no funding, and we're up against some of the top engineers in the world with billions in venture capital.
But we're all still plugging away. Open source is nothing if not tenacious.