PHPEverywhere has a link this morning to a very interesting weblog entry from artima.com. I'm sure it will soon spread across the Open Source world, and cause quite a stir. Why? Read on...

The open source world is presumably interested in proving the superiority of the open source development model, as contrasted to the proprietary techniques adopted by more traditionally commercial vendors. Yet the Perl programmer sees as "the opposition" not Visual Basic, but Python, or Ruby, or Ocaml. The Debian user "hates" Red Hat, or Suse, or Mandrake rather than Windows. MySQL users compete not against Oracle or Sybase users but against PostgreSQL, MSQL and SQLlite.

This entry makes some extremely valid points that a lot of the OS community just misses the boat on (me included). There's a lot to be said for making things work together - I mean, look at Apple. It seems like everything on their entire machine works with everything else, right down to dragging files around (OS level). Why can't Open Source apps have the same abilities? Open interfaces between programs can only help them grow...