RE: good references re. ontologies for S*m*ntic W*b
> I would suggest the development models for the three most
> successful open-source projects: Gnu, the WWW, and Linux.
If I may elaborate...
First, the WWW is not about open-source; it is about open protocols. If
it had been about open-source, it would have been a dismal failure.
Open protocols achieve interop and economies of scale by allowing all
parties to come together regardless of how proprietary or "free as in
Stallmanism" their code is.
The other two examples given of successful open-source products are
simply examples of people taking successful proprietary products and
giving them away or cloning them. Unix and all of the successful Unix
utilities were successful long before Stallman and Torvalds decided to
inject "open source" into the discussion. To claim that "open source"
is in any way responsible for the success of Unix or any of the Unix
utilities; piping model, etc. is just a gross misreading of history (not
that you are making this error). It also dishonors the memory of the
true innovators who brought us all of these things which Stallman and
Torvalds so happily appropriated.
And to take your point perhaps further than you intended, the success
for all of these has nothing to do with "open source". All software
applications compete for user's limited attention spans, and the only
ones that succeed are the ones that successfully attract users. It's
really irrelevant how the software was written, and only mildly
interesting that successful application which attract OSS attention do
so in most cases only after becoming successful.