Open Source Today

Everyone knows AJAX (Asynchronous Java and XML) is the Next Big Thing.

By combining programming with tagging, you can do amazing things. You can embed applications inside tiny bits of hypertext, and get a lot done in the background with minimal user action.

Right now there’s a rush to make all this open source. We know Java itself is moving toward an open source model. IBM is now pushing heavily on this front, proposing an open source AJAX project to Eclipse, and donating some code.

This is where it gets hairy.

Everyone wants their code in the standard platform because that makes them the author of the standard. But for a platform to be a standard, it has to be standardized.