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Thursday, February 23, 2006

SubMarie's: Open Sauce Salad Dressing

Here's another experiment in announcing a document for preview, perusal, and persnickety potshots from the informal “faculty club” who follow these occasional epistolary announcements before subjecting a Web-wide audience to such an un-peer-reviewed bolus of raw keystrokes and undisciplined logic .

Notwithstanding the utopian spirit of grass-roots innovation which suffuses much of the open source software development community, the fact is that much open source software is entirely derivative of commercial products already on the market. There's nothing wrong with this: every intellectual innovation has a multitude of progenitors, and it is the very cross-feeding and cross-breeding of ideas which drives the rapid evolution of technological products; commercial products build on work done by universities and independent investigators, and it's only fair that information should flow in both directions.

In that spirit, I have embarked upon an open source (or, as it were, open sauce) emulation of one of the favourite supermarket staples I left behind when I moved from California to Switzerland in 1991. See SubMarie's for details, and may every batch you make turn out thick, creamy, salty, and tart. Direct comparisons with the bottled product and suggestions for adjusting the recipe to converge toward it are especially invited.

Posted at February 23, 2006 01:40