To paraphrase a famous maxim, “Oh, what a difference a decade makes.”
The emergence of the Internet over the last ten years has brought extraordinary changes to software development. Because of the Internet, large amounts of useful, well-engineered code are now widely available, and much of that code is available for free or under generous licensing terms. Moreover, there’s little distinction these days between developers and end-users: end-users have capitalized on the newly-networked world to take an active role in the development and enhancement of products that many of us use every day.
Still other changes abound. The explosion of web use has prompted organizations to adopt alternatives to capture increasingly divided consumer attention — and attendant marketshare. For instance, and once unheard of, many companies have chosen to loosen their stranglehold on what was once considered the crown jewels of any endeavor: data.
For example, online companies such as Amazon, eBay, and Google publish APIs to their enormous data stores. Allowing and promoting such interoperability has not only spurred additional growth for those companies (and created an entire cottage industry of data retrieval services), it’s also given eager users novel ways to access information far away from the desktop.
In this installment of “Out in the Open,” we introduce you to Slim Devices (http://www.slimdevices.com), another technology company that’s fully embraced the open source model — with great success. While the company’s digital music streaming device, the Squeezebox, has won industry accolades,…
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