People got to get off their utopia world-view thinking companies should be giving away their core-business' secret sauce - the essence that keeps them in business.
There is a clear distinction between core-business-specific platform and the technology their platform is built on which facilitates it (i.e. OSS projects/libraries).
Twitter is built on open-source, they enhance & contribute to existing OSS projects & open source key technologies their platform is built on:
I know. All that is nice, certainly better than many companies. But that doesn't make them role models. I'd like to think we can shoot a little higher in finding role models than companies that utterly lock down their platform but throw us a few scraps for free.
They are perfect Role models since their a successful company who employee great talent who use and contribute back to open source. If something doesn't exist they'll build it and open source key parts of their technology platform and are more than open about what they use and how they're able to scale their incredible load:
Giving away your core-business is corporate suicide, they would be a shadow of themselves if 100 clones surfaced overnight offering the exact same service - and by extension be unable to contribute back to OSS as much as they have.
Your other reply is "dead" for some reason, so I'll reply to it here.
You can build services that interoperate with Gmail over the same protocol. I can run my own email server, even (can you run your own Twitter server?). That interoperability is how Gmail came to exist, disrupting the entrenched hosted email industry and providing a massively better service to its users. If Hotmail had 99% market share and only allowed email to be sent to other Hotmail addresses, then Gmail never would have happened. Yet Gmail survives by providing a great service.
Now compare with Twitter. An open equivalent standard is StatusNet, which powers Identica and other services. But none of them can work with Twitter, because Twitter is a walled garden with 99% of the users. Thus, if Twitter starts to provide a crappy service, it will be much harder for competitors to instigate a Gmail-like disruption because they won't be able to interoperate with existing Twitter users.
Twitter has an API, so you can syndicate your Foo feed through your Twitter account, and download your incoming Tweets to publish elsewhere. How is that different from SMTP, from the accessibility angle?
Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and my own personal mail server can all interoperate with Gmail as first class citizens. I can easily send an email from Gmail to someone using Hotmail. That's how Gmail was able to easily get a foothold in the market, because Gmail users could email users of other email providers.
Identica, other StatusNet installations, and other services cannot fully interoperate with Twitter as first class citizens. How do I send a Tweet from Twitter to someone using Identica, for instance?
Gmail isn't open source - Open APIs/Open Data is not Open Source. People use the Gmail service they allow external integration to broaden Gmails reach/ecosystem - this makes the Gmail service more attractive.
The fact is they'll never Open source the Gmail client which is their secret-sauce/USP that others are looking to replicate. Like twitters application platform, that is not something anyone should ever expect to be given away - its bad business.
Twitter isn't open source either. In that way they are similar to Gmail. Twitter is also headquartered in the US, same as Google. There are innumerable other ways that they are similar.
There are also some major differences, such as the one I described about interoperability. Another difference: unlike Gmail, Twitter's "secret sauce" isn't their website. It's their walled garden social network. Twitter could open source their whole website's code, and it wouldn't much help anyone build a Twitter competitor. StatusNet is already pretty nice.
Also, since we're veering way off topic here, note that I am not arguing that Google is "OSS's best role model", like you said about Twitter. I'm just using Gmail as an example to illustrate how Twitter's walled garden is different than how email works.
The word is federated. Email is federated. Google Wave was federated. Twitter is not federated. You can run your own email server and be a first class citizen in the network. You can't run your own Twitter server and be anything but a layer on top of the Twitter API.
More importantly, federation is inherently decentralized. If GMail goes down, your email server still runs and still inter-operates with the rest of the world.
Suicide? Gmail seems to survive fine. I'm glad people didn't think like you back when email was invented, or we'd still be stuck on our old 5 MB Hotmail accounts (or worse!). People who designed and built systems with their users in mind... those are much better role models than companies like Twitter who build proprietary walled gardens. And going as far as to say Twitter is "OSS's best role model" is just absurd.
I'm sure that's what he was talking about, if he wasn't being sarcastic. But there's a difference between releasing a bit of code on the periphery of your walled garden and being a "role model".
I would never ask a for-profit company to open source their core software if it doesn't meet their business model (sell support, etc.). Here's the thing though: I don't care one bit about how they process tweets internally.
However, the "bit of code on the periphery" that Twitter has released is far more interesting to me. Bootstrap lets me prototype web UIs much faster, for example, and who knows? Maybe some day I'll end up using their contributions to MySQL, Cassandra or Mahout.
So, if only for purely selfish reasons, I say kudos to them.
Kudos for the good things they've done, sure. And criticism for the bad things they've done. But "OSS's best role model"? Laughable. That was the post I replied to.
