In a provocative assessment of Google’s Google+ strategy of launching a “recommended users” list (a topic of its own), Robert Scoble shared an assumption behind his conclusions:

If you have great content you will get found by one of the folks on this list.

It’s an interesting claim. I've heard this kind of thing for years, and always wondered: Is it true? My intuition always said it's not. So last night I questioned Robert's statement in a tweet, and he replied:

@lauras it's pretty rare that good content doesn't get shared with others.

How do we know that it's "rare" that good content doesn't get shared? We know only about the good content we've already found. We have no idea how much good content has not been found. So how can we lay any odds as to how common or rare it is for good content to be found?

And "found" ... by whom?

I thought I'd lay out some thoughts on this and see what people think.

What does it take?

1. The content must be "good".

   We all know that there's a ton of bad content that gets much more attention than good content. But for good content to get found, the question assumes good content. What makes content "good"? That's a question that is addressed piecemeal in the following points.

2. The content must be on a viable platform, in a viable format.

   The content must exist in a form that can be consumed if it is found. A book in Braille is not going to influence many. Your handwritten novel may be fabulous, but the single copy's being on yellow pads, with all the words scribbled in your poor penmanship ill serves your great novel.

3. The content must be findable.

   If people can't get to it, you can't share it. For online content, it must be in a format to be indexed by search engines. For movie content, it must have distribution. Your painting that's viewable only from your livingroom is not findable by others except your house guests. (If only you had a gallery showing!)

   A Confederacy of Dunces was eventually published posthumously and found by a delighted readership and a satisfied Pulitzer committee, but what if John Kennedy Toole's mother didn't champion his manuscript after his suicide and convince a publisher to publish it? How many John Kennedy Tooles have passed through the world, leaving behind great manuscripts that never will be read?

4. The content must be accessible.

   How many provocative news articles languish behind a paywall, never to be accessed by the people who could most infuentially share it? How much great content in China is never found because it's censored? An Internet without Net Neutrality could render much content completely inaccessible due to preferential content mainstreaming deals by access providers.

5. The content must be understandable.

   It must use a common language. It must use existing cultural references. We can love the music of Beethoven because he touches us in musical language still used today, but we are lost hearing Javanese gamelan, and modern avant-garde composers might speak in musical references too modern or obscure for us to grasp. How much ancient Greek poetry can be enjoyed when Greek is no longer taught in university?

6. The content must have some audience.

   Here's the trick. Somebody must start the sharing chain. Likely it takes a lot of somebodies to achieve some sort of sharing critical mass. How many of the most interesting people you know don't have a popular blog, don't have a jillion Twitter followers, aren't in oodles of Google+ circles? I can't count them all on the fingers of both hands. There are simply too many to count.

   My own blog has a small audience, but perhaps is on the radar of just enough people where good content fitting all the criteria listed here could break out and be "found". But if I tweet about my post, I can perhaps reach a slightly larger audience (via a fraction of my Twitter followers). On the other hand, if my post is Drupal-related and appears on Planet Drupal, my audience is suddenly and automatically increased by an order of magnitude, meaning so many more people can see and pass along my content if they deem it to be "good".

   How many content creators have that kind of audience available, who in turn can share that content with yet other people? Yes, there are some popular thinkers out there really putting out good content. But let's face it, most of the popular stuff is pretty crappy.

   Which leads us to:

7. The content must stand out in the noise.

   And there's a lot of noise these days. In the above-referenced Google+ joint, Scoble states: "Most people can only follow 250 people. In fact, the average user follows far less than that." That's because of noise. How much great content passed right before your eyes on Twitter, flitting by before your attention was drawn? I probably see 1% of all the stuff that crosses my Twitter feed, and that's on a good day, and even then I actually read only a fraction of that. Most of what we see is noise. But I love the serendipity that comes from following too many people.

   But if everyone is following only 250 people or fewer, how interconnected are we, really? Does your headline grab attention? Does your post have a striking image? Does your so-well-crafted jewelry look too much like discount store junk for anyone to notice its fine qualities? Has your essay topic been played so much that your most-insightful points aren't enough to gain anyone's attention?

   This last leads us to:

8. The content must be timely.

   This doesn't apply only to the insightful post on the latest political event can't be posted weeks after everyone has forgotten about the event. It also means that your content must fit the concept of what's "good" in that era. Vincent Van Gogh died a pauper; we can say his paintings were "found", but did he ever know it? Much of our filtering mechanisms are conscribed by popular culture – popular media culture, popular political culture, popular academic culture, you name it. The most-shared good content will fit within those contemporary frames – not "ahead of its time", not out of fashion, not when the event is forgotten, not when the moment has passed. Many a bon mot would have been more bon had they not been "esprit d'escalier".

9. The implied author must have an appropriate identity.

   Your public image of you (as opposed to the "real" you – c.f., Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction) is how many will decide whether you're worth paying attention to. If they've decided yes, your content gets higher consideration. If they've decided no, your content is dismissed out of hand. If they don't know, well, then it depends on your perceived identity and how it "fits" into the context of things – or how it "fits in", period. Scoble points out that "Most content on social networks is developed by only 5% and most of the audience listens to the top 5% of that." The most popular bloggers link to each other, because they perceive each other as credible enough to read.

   What about those not already in the echo chamber? They must have an identity that appeals. Despite all the public touting of how we live in an age of "tribes", we tend to vastly underestimate the value of having an identity appropriate and acceptable enough to influence others. And yet what is social networking but a way of forming tribes to filter out the noise? If you don't "fit in" the tribal filter, you're part of the noise as far as others are concerned.

   Sometimes that's just by circumstance. Sometimes it's by preconceived stereotypes. For years, women have known that (many) guys don't link. In the tech world, a start-up with venture capital backing is taken much more seriously than a start-up with no backing; not only the venture capital PR muscle, but the very fact of having gotten venture backing at all helps start-ups stand out from the noise and be perceived as worth paying attention to. Joe Coder comes up with a fabulous new app and nobody pays attention, unless the app gets some sales traction; Pete Programmer with Acme Ventures backing gets buzz before the app is even approved by Apple.

   I would argue that perhaps the biggest impact Acquia had on the success of Drupal came from nothing more than the fact that Acquia got venture backing, which put it and Drupal on the radar of tech bloggers and journalists, who then put Drupal on the radar of many who've since adopted Drupal for their projects. And yet some of the most profound and influential content about Drupal has happened outside of that paradigm. But those content creators didn't have the right identity to be found. (This is nothing against Acquia as a company. Acquia does much more than raise the visibility of Drupal, don't get me wrong. But seeing the rather sudden "discovery" of Drupal once Acquia announced funding was really hard for the rest of us to miss. [Disclosure: My business does business with Acquia. Many Acquians are my friends.]

   In another example, in Google+, you must have the right kind of identity to even participate. If you have the "wrong" identity, how likely is it your "good" content will be found?

10. The content must last (long enough).

    Paintings rot. Books dry up and blow away. Great movies of the 1930s and 1940s disintegrated or burned in vaults. The fire of Alexandria took away how much greatness from even the possibility of our discovering it? This challenge will never leave us, even in the digital age. How ironic that an essay noting the ephemeral nature of digital content can be found only via the Wayback Machine!

In a perfect world, there are fields of dreams

The success of good content (no matter how you define "good") depends upon each of these links. If one breaks, odds are that content will languish in obscurity. If everything lines up perfectly, then all you need to is build it and they will come. For those of us on the Internet, we have it pretty good – better than ever in history, perhaps. Content creators weren't so lucky thousands of years ago. Even a couple of decades ago.

And content creators aren't so lucky in media that doesn't happen entirely online. In Hollywood, for example, one of the old saws preached by the successful is, "If you write a great script, it will get made." They justify this by the fact that good scripts are extremely rare in their world – so rare that bad scripts have to be produced into movies because there are not enough good scripts to feed the production/distribution machine. (This perspective also validates their own sense of self-worth: If they "made it" in Hollywood, it's because they did good work, right?) Yes, the good scripts that actually get their attention have some chance of getting made. But do those good scripts tell stories that studio executives think people will pay to see? Do they have good roles to draw marketable stars? Do the stories tell a political message the executives are comfortable with?

And what about all those scripts that never get read by the Hollywood decisionmakers – the people who not only can say 'no' (of which there are many) but can also say 'yes' (of which there are very few)? One of the most common entry-level positions in Hollywood is that of "reader". The reader reads undiscovered scripts that are submitted (to the agency, to the production company, to the studio) and writes "coverage" that becomes the actual measure for assessment by others. Culling is done by the reader directly, and by others who don't read the script but only read the reader's coverage of the script. There are who-knows-how-many great scripts that never get past this stage.

How much good art that exists in your community do you know about? How many good white papers have been posted by authors you're not predisposed to find credible? How many good novels have a cover you find unappealing and never pick up?

If you're a content creator, so much of your success is out of your hands. You need some degree of luck or providence. Seneca wrote, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." Corollary: Luck cannot happen if you are not prepared. But you cannot make luck happen. All you can do is be prepared, and be persistent at that preparation, and not blink if the opportunity comes.

That is how great content is found.

What do you think?

[Photo by "Ken & Nyetta (Creative Commons)]

Yesterday, we had a Drupal Association Board Meeting to discuss upcoming DrupalCons. The meeting ran very long as we discussed and debated what criteria we should consider in selecting cities for DrupalCons in 2012, 2013 and beyond. Passions ran hot at times as we hashed out our thoughts on our evolving process for making these decisions.

• What is the purpose of DrupalCon?
• What components make for a great DrupalCon?
• What factors play into selecting a city for throwing a majorly successful DrupalCon?

In the end, I feel that we made a lot of progress in this meeting. This post is not a debrief of this meeting, though, but rather is a collection of some of my own thoughts about DrupalCon, shared as a member of the Drupal community.

Growing presents challenges

As Drupal continues to grow so quickly, the Drupal Association has been working hard to adapt. The community is many times larger than when I joined it over 6 years ago, even since when the Drupal Association launched in 2006.

• Members on Drupal.org are now over 1 million 515784. [I stand corrected. User id's are over 1000000, but many accounts have withered, were never used after registration, or turned out to be spammers who were blocked. And since about uid 600000 the uid numbers have been incremented by 5 2, not 1. Even so, that's a lot more than when I first joined.]
• There are more Drupal Meetups happening around the world ... and many meetups are growing in size.
• Drupal Camps in various cities are proliferating and growing. Many are now bigger than DrupalCons were just a few years ago.

No question: People want their Drupal, and they want their Drupal events.

Worldwide there are all kinds of Drupal community events of all sizes. For the Drupal Association, we've decided to focus our attention (for now) just on DrupalCons, as they are the most challenging to pull off, most expensive to produce, and are the only Drupal events that are primarily international in nature. Who else but the Drupal Association is in a position to produce DrupalCons?

(We've been testing ways to support regional Drupal Camps, and are looking for ways to help support Drupal Meetups, code sprints, hackathons, and other smaller community events that help people get better at Drupal and get more involved in the Drupal community. More on that in 2011....)

On the Drupal Association Board, I think we're all in general agreement that DrupalCon is about serving the Drupal community. But what that phrase "serving the Drupal Community" actually means can differ, depending upon whom you ask. Each of us on the Board has his or her own idea. This is what we ended up discussing in great depth — or as much as could be covered in 6 hours.

But difference of opinion about DrupalCon mirrors the diversity of the greater Drupal community. Indeed, yesterday, as word of our discussion got out, some people began tweeting thoughts and attitudes about DrupalCons. (I'm not going to try to characterize those tweets, or the thoughts of anyone else. We all have our own ideas. Perhaps you will share your own thoughts in comments below?)

It's about the community

Drupal is fabulously powerful software, no question. The ways it can be used to build quickly all kinds of powerful websites and web apps that otherwise would require potentially tens of thousands of programming hours to get off the ground make Drupal extremely appealing to businesses and individuals alike. I'm simply thrilled by the success Drupal has enjoyed in the online world, and delight being able to draw upon Drupal for solutions to challenges I face every day at work at PINGV Creative.

But to me, what makes Drupal a powerful force in the web design and development marketplace is the community.

When I go to DrupalCons, it's like getting a contact high. The collective energy of all these people, who are all there to learn about Drupal, get better at Drupal, meet people to work with on Drupal, hire people to work on Drupal, share what they're working on in Drupal, and just connect with other people in "real" life that they otherwise see only online, is invigorating. Code sprints, documentation sprints, theming sprints, keynotes that make you think, sessions that feed your brain, parties that help you wind down — DrupalCon is an experience in full.

As the community grows, how can DrupalCon adapt? So far, we've been making DrupalCons larger to accommodate demand. Naturally that's going to change the character of things. It takes more work to produce a DrupalCon now. A lot more work. It takes real money as well to secure the venue(s), buy the food, establish wifi for one of the most network-resource-demanding crowds of any conference per capita, build and maintain the website, handle ticket sales, staff the event, work with sponsors, and the list goes on and on.

This leaves us with a choice: Make DrupalCons small, and lock out thousands of people who want to come; or let DrupalCons grow, and find ways to underwrite the expense and effort it takes to throw a major event in a different city twice each year.

We've obviously gone the latter way, and for my part this is a good thing. The more people can get exposed to Drupal through DrupalCon, the better for Drupal. And yet it's not just about numbers. We want this to be about the community.

One commitment the Board made early on was to keep the ticket price affordable. People may differ on what's "affordable," but for me it means keeping it under about $100 per day. We want to make it easy for people curious about Drupal to drop by. We want it to be accessible to your average person living on a budget. And we have a scholarship program to provide free passes to people in particular financial need.

In short, if the event is too expensive, only the true believers who have the wherewithal to come will come, and we won't grow the community through this event. And that would be a failure, in my opionion.

But there are other ways DrupalCons can serve the community:

• Offer quality sessions that share knowledge. This has been a touchstone for every DrupalCon ever, but this doesn't mean other kinds of sessions don't slip through. I'm not all that thrilled about brag sessions, for example, where presenters show off something, but don't really share the how or what so that the attendees actually learn something more than "Joe certainly thinks very highly of himself." Or sessions where the presenter has 10 minutes of material, and then just fields questions (if there are any). I prefer sessions I can sink my teeth into. These are the kinds of sessions I try to create when I'm presenting.
• Provide ways for people to get involved. The code sprints are great, but lately they've had the image of being just for the elite developers — which is an essential part of DrupalCon, because when else will so many core developers be able to get in the same room for uninterrupted hours of collaboration? But also important are the quiet "coder rooms" we've had lately, where people can hunker down and get their hands dirty. And the birds-of-a-feather rooms where people can gather on a smaller scale to workshop or discuss whatever interests them.
• Revealing all kinds of things you didn't know you didn't know. It's also exciting to see what others are doing. The community is quite huge. There's so much going on that duplication of efforts can be a real problem. DrupalCon provides a great way to connect people across continents, and expose people to all kinds of things other people are doing, including oodles of things you never even knew was happening. That is exciting, and I feel provides a rush for many of us attending. Many, if not most, of us leave DrupalCon fired up to do more. You don't get that from a forum or IRC chat.

Community is the foundation. All else comes from that — the code, the business, the cool websites….

Clients follow the community, not the other way around

To me, this is how open source works. I'm sure many won't agree with me on this point. But the Drupal community came to be before the Drupal ecosphere. Today it may be hard to discern, because clients are such a huge part of the Drupal community. Professional paid Drupal work is a major driving force in Drupal development, and we definitely want to keep that paradigm going. Drupal can't thrive if it's only a hobbyist's technology.

And yet, my view is that the clients are there not simply because Drupal is the bee's knees. Drupal is a powerful technology, no question, but it's the community that makes Drupal's technological power credible. The thousands upon thousands of people all collaborating on the commons that is Drupal are really why Drupal is so great ... or at least a hugely major reason. In choosing any open source project, the savvy client looks at the strength of the community behind it. Drupal wins because of all of us thousands of people behind it, working ot make it better. Take the Drupal code as it stands today, and back it with a community of 100 people only, and you'll see usage of Drupal flatten and eventually drop.

Nobody wants to adopt an open source technology with weak community support.

By extension, I see DrupalCon as best benefiting the professional Drupal consulting ecosphere by focusing on building and strengthening the community, rather than focusing on making an event optimized for finding clients and making deals. I say this because if we do the former, the latter follows.

Someone has to pay for it

And this gets us back to cost, because if we can't keep DrupalCons affordable to people, the events will not be doing all they can to help build and strengthen the community.

Over the years, there have been complaints about how DrupalCon sponsors have become increasingly visible. Some have asserted that the Drupal Association focuses too much attention on sponsors.

Here's the thing: When events cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce, someone has to pay. If we keep the ticket costs down to make them affordable to a lot of people, the balance of cost has to be picked up by the sponsors. We want sponsors. We need sponsors. Otherwise we don't have events. Or we have ticket prices 2x, 3x, 4x more expensive.

And yet I also see sponsors as community members. We don't want to use up sponsors as if they're bamboo forests, expendable and replenishable. Our sponsors are part of our community. Most of the sponsors are in fact Drupal shops that comprise an important part of our community code, design and documentation efforts. DrupalCon sponsorships are not just revenue sources, they're also a major means for these companies and organizations to engage with and contribute to the community.

Sponsorship rates have gone up as the costs of events have gone up – and (very important) as attendance has gone up. My feeling is that we want to continue to offer a very diverse range of sponsorship opportunities, so that Fortune 500 companies can pony up big money for a big presence, while smaller shops can engage at lower financial levels. Over the various DrupalCons of recent years, there's been variable success at achieving this, and we're always looking for ways to do better.

What do you think?

I'm going to wrap up this rambling post here. What do you think? What makes a great DrupalCon? What would you like to see? What are DrupalCons getting right? How would you like DrupalCons to improve? What were your favorite DrupalCons of the past? And why?

Okay, it's a whimsical title. But on this Ada Lovelace Day, I was thinking about how, if Ada Lovelace were alive today, she no doubt would be in technology. After all, the creator of the first "computer" wouldn't stop there, would she?

In my daily life I get to work with some amazing women who are working in, with or on Drupal. I wrote an appreciation over at PINGV Creative.

Comic: XKCD #225.

Open Source has been around for quite some time, but odds are most people you ask won't know what "open source" is. This isn't because open source is obscure, but rather it has slipped into the mainstream, and unless you're already in the know, there's no real reason you will have noticed it.

But open source is here, and it's growing.

Linux maximus

Linux was written by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Linux itself was based on earlier incomplete kernels that themselves were available for reworking and building upon. When Torvalds licensed Linux under the GNU public license, there was mostly scoffing in the media, with a small minority of voices predicting widespread growth in the future. Now a majority of web servers worldwide are running Linux (see Wikipedia, above), and Linux dominates the supercomputer market and adoption in high-end special effects houses in Hollywood. Linux also powers auto electronics, weapons systems, and an increasing number of desktop, laptop and netbook computers.

My prediction: Linux distros will continue to gain desktop and laptop popularity as they develop more usability and visual style improvements. Ultimately, though, it will take hardware driver maker support (or replacement) to create the happy turn-on-and-use experience most non-geeks want out of a computer. Usability is a hard thing to design by committee, but once it starts kicking in, I don't see much of anything holding Linux back. (And no, I don't see computers going away altogether. The cloud is nice, but with all that local processing power there is a great opportunity for cooler, better apps that can leverage that cloud far better than a generic browser. [Not to mention privacy and security concerns that will always hound an open network.] I may be way off on this one, but I don't think so.)

Firefox burns

Last week Firefox 3.5 became the world's #1 browser release, edging out Internet Explorer 7. Of course, when you add in Internet Explorer 8 and the dead-but-not-buried Internet Explorer 6, Microsoft still holds the largest market share. Still, as ZDNet's Paula Rooney notes, open source has been putting the squeeze on IE.

The days of Internet Explorer’s dominance appear to be waning. Of course, Microsoft’s Windows operating system monopoly still owns the market, but we’re not sure how long that will matter, especially as software-as-a-service models take off and Google’s web-focused operating system is prepped for release.

As Microsoft’s grip on the browser market loosens, opportunities for open source rivals are blossoming. It will be interesting to see which of the two top open source browsers benefits most in 2009 [sic].

My prediction: Indeed, 2010 will be interesting for the browser market. Firefox will continue to grow, but Google Chrome, especially with Google's banner ad-driven marketing push, could be #1 by 2011, pushing IE8 and IE9 out of any hope for the #1 release spot. And this will be huge as webapps and software-as-a-service continue to take up more of the usage market from desktop apps. In fact, this latter development will push Microsoft hard to fall in line with web standards and fight to keep up with the far larger open source development communities of its browser competitors.

Android joy

Android is the open source (Linux-based) operating system for handhelds that is powering a small but growing number of smart phones, including the Motorola Droid and the new Google Phone that was given to Google employees as a holiday gift. Forrester predicts Android smartphones will have 10% market share by end of 2010. I would be surprised if it's not more. (Want a Droid? I do!)

Katherine Noyes of LinuxInsider writes:

As for Linux Girl's hopes and predictions? Her eyes are on netbooks, Android and other portable devices as the area where Linux will continue to gain major ground.

The masses are getting used to Linux whether they realize it or not, even as the desktop begins to slowly fade away. Forget the Year of Linux on the Desktop, and get ready for the Year of Linux in Consumers' Hands! Can't ask for much more than that.

My prediction: Android phones will have the buzz at end of 2010. By 2020, Android will be around in some form, morphed to suit whatever devices people are using then, but I have no idea if Apple will be still rocking then. Maybe the iPhone will be seen only in museums?

Open but less known

Drupal drops up

Drupal has been around for almost 10 years, but this past year saw increasing adoption by high profile sites and government agencies including WhiteHouse.gov.

And Drupal is not alone in the open source CMS market. See Dee-Ann Leblanc on what's coming for Open Source CMSs in 2010.

My prediction: With the new Drupal 7 coming just around the corner, expect to see another spike in Drupal buzz and Drupal usage. And with the new features and structures in place, also expect the Drupal market to change in very interesting ways. (N.B.: [BlogHer.com, where I first posted this] has been running Drupal since 2006.)

MySQL is your SQL

This database that powers so many apps you can't even begin to count
CIO's Nancy Weil predicts that Oracle will make the open source MySQL database system a core part of its Unbreakable Linux package.

My prediction: If Oracle tries to clamp down on MySQL, one or two other open source database projects — including a new or existing fork of MySQL — will emerge and come to a rising market share within a year.

Inscape and Blender and GIMP (oh my!)

Open source design programs are just getting better. Inkscape does a lot what Adobe Illustrator does. GIMP is an open source photo manipulation program that will do what most people use Adobe Photoshop for. Blender is a respectable open source 3D animation program. These applications are not new, but I expect their use to only increase as they continue to evolve.

My prediction: Expect the predicted Adobe CS5 release in 2010, and its predictable (high) pricing, to drive more buzz and market to these open source alternatives. But Blender will need a high profile adopter to get similar buzz.

Open Office market not so micro

Open Office is the open source desktop software suite that comes close to replacing Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. It's not perfect, but can fit the bill if you're finding Microsoft Office's pricing a bit too dear.

My prediction: Open Office will continue to eek out minor gains in the private user market, but will struggle to convince conservative and under-budgeted IT managers in corporations and government agencies to adopt a new, unfamiliar product. However, 10 years from now....? A lot can happen in 10 years.

Why oh why is open source so popular?

While open source software — or at least the most successful examples of open source software — is free, I don't think that's why this will be the open source decade. Rather, it's that open source is open.

Cost does come into play, but indirectly ... on the supplier side. Open source is disrupting many markets where scarcity enforced by proprietary software licenses drove up costs. With the commons competing in development, that scarcity is challenged, effectively driving down those nice profit margins that made people like Bill Gates rich.

And if there's interest to take it into a new direction, there's nothing to stop them. Forks happen.

So as long as there's community interest (read: demand) for the product, it's not going to die. This software is not going to disappear unless people stop being interested in using it.

For example, just because Android was primarily developed by Google, it doesn't mean Android is dependent upon Google to continue to evolve. On the contrary. Just because Drupal was created by Dries Buytaert doesn't mean that, if Dries decides to quit software and go do pottery in Bali, Drupal will crumble. The Linux industry has grown way beyond the origination by Linus Torvalds or its corporate distribution by Red Hat.

What does this mean to you? Nothing, if you want to ignore it. But if you are paying attention, it could mean opportunities.

As a consumer, it might influence your buying decisions. For example, I would be much more comfortable buying an Android phone than a phone powered by Windows. I had lived for over a year with a Palm 700P, which ran the proprietary Palm OS, which was outmoded and little supported. I have no idea whether Palm will be around much longer, so I don't know if I would consider a Palm anything unless it was at least running an open sourced (and well supported) OS. Buy an Android phone and odds are you will be able to continue to buy phones in the future running Android, with the same familiar interface (albeit always improving). No company is going to EOL Android. No company can.

As an entrepreneur, open source might present a business opportunity. What? Without proprietary software? How is that possible? Well, let's look at other industries. Plumbing is essentially open source. There are no big secrets, just acquired know-how that comes from doing the work. And yet plumbers have businesses in every town with plumbing. Law is open source. The law is there for all to see. But if you learn it sufficiently, you can build a practice into a lucrative career.

In other words, business does not require secrets.

This doesn't mean that all proprietary softwares are going away. Not at all. But I do expect that in 10 years most people will have a pretty good idea what open source means to them, or at least will be pretty big consumers of open source products.

Mark my words.

This was posted on BlogHer.