The state of open source: Visions of utopia

Roundtable: 11 leaders from the open source and vendor communities discuss the current open source climate and outline the challenges and opportunities ahead

 

Zack Urlocker
Vice president of products
MySQL

Urlocker: I don't know what you mean by "software universe" but I will take a guess. To me, the ideal software universe is an interoperable stack where you can chose best-of-breed software at each layer and know that it's all standards-based and will work together. And ideally you could pick the different pieces and still have a simple GUI install that makes it easy to deploy. I'd also like to see some of the distinctions in how programmers work with data be simplified. Why does the developer need to know how data is stored in order to use it efficiently? The software should be smart enough to hide these implementation details. Also, I think developer productivity took a huge hit when we moved from GUI development with visual tools and frameworks to Web-based applications. It's like we lost 10 years of improvement. Only now are things starting to catch up with frameworks for languages like Ruby on Rails, Groovy/Grails, Scala, Zend Framework, etc.

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Jason Snyder is senior editor at InfoWorld.