Re: [LUG] Google Wave Invites?

[Steven Côté <steven.cote@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Surely that kinda goes against the ethos of "open source" though (or

rather, of Free Software)? Who decides when it "is ready"?  I don't
like carrot dangling - if you're going to "open source" something in
the end, why not do it now?

Well, it's not exactly following the "release early, release often" credo, but I've seen comercial companies do this sort of thing in the past. As far as I understand, the reason is to ensure that they'll be first to market with a fully functioning product. That way any one outside the company who wants to work on the product is more likely to treat their implementation as the "master" and contribute back to it rather than some other fork.

The real-life effect is that while we may all be free to create our own implementations and release our own competing versions, it's unlikely to happen anytime soon, because there's already a fully functioning implementation there that doesn't need to be developed. It's much easier to release a rebranded version of the Google code, changing just the bits we need/want to (and if they're at all useful, they then get absorbed back into the the Google reference implementation).
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