Google Wiki, Where Art Thou?
Moreover, open-source wiki specialist MindTouch will soon trot out a new wiki hosting service for creating mashups and composite applications.

While he wouldn’t publicly speculate on what Google is doing with the JotSpot assets, MindTouch co-founder Aaron Fulkerson did his part of an open-source torch bearer, claiming that he doesn’t put much stock in proprietary wiki solutions.

Fulkerson told eWEEK the proprietary approach will ultimately prove fatal for wiki providers—even Google—because customers don’t want to use closed systems for collaboration.

Well, that’s kind of what I said. What I actually said was that software buyers are becoming increasingly discerning when evaluating closed source software. Open source makes a lot more business sense than closed source/proprietary. Take JotSpot for example. They were, of course, closed source/proprietary. When Jotspot was acquired by Google their users were left without any support, updates, or bug fixes. It’s been over a year now. The software is basically withering on the vine and the users were left out in the proverbial cold. Now look at Zimbra. They were recently acquired by Yahoo!. Zimbra is open source. Zimbra’s users have a thriving community to turn to for support, updates, and bug fixes. Also, users have access to the source code and they can fix bugs and make improvements themselves. Or hire a third party to do the development. It’s most likely the case they won’t have to though because the community will continue to improve Zimbra and release these improvements to the public. My point was/is that open source makes a lot more sense and software consumers are starting to catch on to this. JotSpot perfectly embodies the pitfalls of closed source.

As for Google’s Wiki. I spoke on this topic previously when it was last rumored that it was going to launch. I’ll not repeat the hearsay I’ve been privy to, because it’s just hearsay, but my presumptions echo those of the other person in the article.

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