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Charlie and I were talking about Socialight’s open source client and one good point he made really stood out: How do you create a groundswell out of this? How do you get others to do the same? He said it felt too much like “here’s what we’re doing” instead of “here’s what everyone should do”. The latter idea is exactly the point I was going for but I don’t think my language was right. I probably got distracted by the excitement of being published again (like in grad school). So, some amendments are in order.
Why should everyone do this?
For starters, if there had been a similar open and well-documented client in the marketplace, we wouldn’t have had to spend two months of hard work recreating our own application. This had to have been one of the most frustrating things we went through. There were so many other features to work on but we were devoting nearly all our time on simple client-side interface details. We know other mobile developers have the same difficulty in developing interfaces but have done very little to share their work. We hope to lead by example.
This is not a new concept, really
We’ve already seen numerous examples of how openness and sharing can lead to better products and faster development cycles. Consider the work that’s been put into Rails. The platform not only provides an underlying development framework, but also makes available numerous plugins and sample code to make your job easier. If we have something similar in the mobile world, we’ll have a much easier time creating the products we love and want to build. We’ll spend less time worrying about the underlying principles behind something like GUI buffering code (which is not something every mobile developer needs to know).
Open for you…and you and you and you
More than anything, this code means more openness and should mean more to developers and others in the industry that it does for Socialight itself. If the app were closed, Socialight would still need a client and we would continue to develop it closed for our needs. However – if the app were open, Socialight would get the same benefit of having a client but now other developers will have something to touch and use. Both external developers and Socialight win in this situation because by having it open, both parties benefit from future improvements.
So where does that leave us
Open code is not a unique thing – it’s been around for as long as software itself. I think the difference here is open startup code. We’re all in the same small developer boat – especially in mobile. I think we can really help each other out even more if we all did this. I hope to leave you this time not only with a “so here’s what I did” but rather “here’s the start of something bigger”. Here are the first bits of what we’re going to do.
I guess the one thing I didn’t do in my last writeup was to make a call for action. So here it is. The game’s started – knight to f3. Your move.
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