GitHub, Openness In The Cloud Era

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.

Cloud computing is quickly becoming, or possibly has already become, the de facto way new applications are developed and deployed. The days of on-premises, device specific software for the most part, has come to end. Data and its related API’s is now the platform of choice for developers. At the forefront of this transition are online tools like the free open source hosting platform GitHub, which has become the key method for where and how developers contribute and collaborate in 2013. In many ways, GitHub is the very definition of “openness” with-in the development world with millions of hackers around the globe actively and openly collaborating with one another.

A recent ReadWrite.com post describes GitHub as “the largest online storage space of collaborative works that exists in the world. Whether you’re interested in participating in this global mind meld or in researching this massive file dump of human knowledge, you need to be here.”…

With millions of users and more than $100 million in funding, to say GitHub is a massive success would be putting it mildly. But it does frame a broader question. Does the source “code” matter any more? Or is it the platform and how we collaborate that matters most? Is the new definition of open source purely the ability to openly share your ideas, be it an App, a written work or something else? Has open source as a concept evolved beyond that of source code into a philosophy on how we share and interact with one another?…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/10/03/github-openness-in-the-cloud-era/