What's this: * * * * * *? Wiki notation for machine gun fire, of course!

Mike Cannon-Brookes - the smart young founder of Atlassian Software - has launched a blog called Wikizen, whose third post Opening shots in a wiki war? makes a good point about Open Source vs Open Data in reference to recent chatter about a Wiki war between US-based vendors:

"As a customer, I'd use an application with open access to data over an application with only open source...
Take mail clients as an example. I don't feel locked into a mail client which uses mbox format for storage - no matter how proprietary it is. I know I can take my mail boxes and move to another client that supports mbox. I don't use Outlook, not because it's proprietary, but because I can't get my mails out of the damned PST file if I need to."

In summary, Open source is important but Open Data is more important. Absolutely.

It is positively pythonesque for small vendors to start fighting over individual customers at this early stage in the development of the market, but in order to avoid further bullets flying and the use of other more damaging notational weaponry, here's a proposal for the lazyweb:

In Harry Potter, new children at Hogwarts school have to put on a talking hat that assesses their character and recommends an appropriate 'house' to join. Can we build a wiki-selector hat for potential clients to avoid further conflict:

"There's nothing hidden in your head
The Sorting Hat can't see,
So try me on and I will tell you
Where you ought to be."


Hmmm .... proprietary code makes you vexed...
must be Socialtext!
Aha! You think modular mini-wiki-apps are hot!...
must be Jot Spot!
Hmmm... if it's corporate IT you must influence...
go for Confluence!"

I should add, by the way, that I think Ross and his Socialtext team are great, and we love Atlassian's products too - we recommend and use both companies' products. JotSpot also seems good, but we haven't yet used it in the field.