JD Lasica and myself started launching ourmedia.org back in January - as were closing in on the final specs, the code was up and running and content was being feed into the engine.

There’s an IT Conversation in the can and literally dozens of inetrviews and articles waiting to happen - as soon as it’s ready.

But we’re sitll not live yet - while the PR is starting to show up. That inherent propagation delay is part of the old school piepeline that has existed since the beginning of technology PR. Markoff played with that pipeline last week with an exclusive on Odeo that pissed off at least one person. Whether or not it’s king making versus great reporting is to be debated, but Ev and Noah are just lucky they had their PAID programmers line up and ship on time.

But JD and I haven’t been as lucky, mainly because ourmedia.org is a product of a grassroots effort of MANY free contributers. And we’re not a company - rather an ‘open source infrastructure’ effort!

The game has always been to balance timeliness with the monthlies, while striking quickly with the weeklies, dailies and PR newsires.

As long as memes and news spit our quicky, product launches just kind of fit into everything as fodder for the fire and churn.

But now that I’m part of an effort to actualy ship a solid product - based largely on contributory efforts - it’s nearly impossible to predict or time correctly a launch of a product.

That’s ONE of the reasons my company - Broadband Mechanics - starting PAYING some folks to make sure that ourmedia.org - would ship.

Not because we saw some resources as better than others - but because - at the end of the day - you can’t RELY upon free labor.

This is the great fallacy of open source code. That it’s done ONLY by free, contributory work. From what I see - it’s a balance between free and paid work that produces open source code. Which means that the owners are not just the ‘people’ and that each project has it’s own unique balance and definition of open source code.

Certainly MySQL is different than Flickr or WebJay. Are they different because you can’t get the SOURCE of Flickr or even Amazon - or are they’re NOT open source - even though their APIs are?

I believe that Tim O’Reilly defines Amazon or Flickr as open source - even though they don’t share their source. Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive provide free hosting and bandwidth - though their open source code is something else - entirely.

I was hoping to get this debate out into the open at Etech, but instead we’ll be hearing from the usual on suspects on the latest shell scripts. Hopefully some sort of BoF will happen.

ourmedia.org WILL share it’s source - which is based upon a GPL license - based upon Drupal. So ANYBODY can build their own unique version of ourmedia.org. They can fork the code, but god forbid if they fork the APIs.

JD and I are debating the difference between sponsors and partners of ourmedia.org right now, but what more interests me is “what is open source?” Are accesible APIs and open schemas enough to call something open source?

Are open discussions and the free marketplace enough to call something open? ‘Cause there’s one thing I CAN tell yah - “code don’t get written by consensus or democracy.”

UPDATE: I’m back in the States and Brewster asked me if there was something that they did wrong? NO! The IA and Parker Thompson have been FANTASTIC on this project. My line about “though their open source code is something else” was referring to the fact that even though the IA gives away a TON of stuff - not ALL their family jewels are available in open source form. That’s all. The REAL value of what the IA offers is the storage and bandwitdh. Now of course there’s also the open source spider and search engine and tons of other stuff (which totally rocks BTW.) So the IA is certainly pulling it’s weight and making HUGE contributions to the world. But not ALL of it is available for open source. That’s all I was trying to say.

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