“Tim’s keynote speech on Thursday highlighted an important new
kind of software application and development. … He asserts that
the most important software developments of the last five years
have never been downloaded to the desktop. For example, consider
Mapquest, Amazon, and Napster. These applications are not
distributed in the traditional retail sense; that is, you don’t get
them on a disk, and you don’t download them from the Web. You just
go to the Web site and you use them. “Performance” is the mark of
use, not ownership.”
“Tim notes that these applications blur the rules we currently
use in the open source movement. It doesn’t make sense to get the
code from the Amazon site, download it, and create your own Amazon
or debug theirs. But it does still make sense to look at these
types of applications and figure out how to gain insight and
information from them in ways their creators did not
intend.”
“Tim mentioned “amarank,” a program we use at O’Reilly to gather
and organize book data made freely available at the Amazon site.
Tom Christiansen created this Perl script (and Tim Allwine modified
it) to use the data that Amazon displays programmatically. Tim
suggests that such applications, in the spirit of open source,
anticipate this kind of use and provide APIs to make it easier. He
noted the reaction of Rael Dornfest, Senior Web Developer at
O’Reilly Network and creator of meerkat, when he found out that
people were writing programs against meerkat results. Rather than
preventing or ignoring their use of his data, he provided an API to
let them use it easily and correctly.”