The Silent Penguin

I think it's cool because I like the idea of someone doing things with Alfresco, for example, that we lack desire, bandwidth, or forethought/creativity to do. Talking with Reuven about it (I agree - there's nothing there yet. It's just an idea), the idea is to take bits and pieces of different systems and tie them together in ways that the project leads or companies might not have considered.

So, for example, Alfresco and Sugar are working on an integration. But it may not be fairly plain compared to something that you or another talented developer might choose to do.

Will it be a huge financial or market success? Maybe, maybe not. Most of the Web 2.0 mash-ups strike me as cute and clever, but nothing I'd pay for. But if the point is simply to tie technology together in innovative ways for some limited purpose, what's not to like?

Matt

I still don't get it.

Alfresco consists of other Open Source components and/or frameworks. So it already is a mashup - isn't it? The individual components (i.e. Open Source projects) have communities for example. Building a community around a "mashup" Alfresco is a challenging task in itself already.

A project like Cocoon is a great example of a mashup - lots of given components remixed into a new something. So I'm all for it.

But - the resulting mashups are new projects in their own right. They get a home on sourceforge or Apache and build their communities. Who is going to do that on OpenSourceMashup? Who is going to submit, maintain and support the bits that can be remixed? And aren't those then forks of the underlying projects?

Mashups of smaller entities (i.e maybe just individual modules or classes is called - at least as I remember it - programming. And again, that would then lead to new projects on Sourceforge etc.

I'm all for re-use but I just don't see how throwing up a GForge installation and expecting everyone to start submitting and maintaing pieces of Open Source projects will work.