Simon Willison’s Weblog

An OpenSocial Foundation. “Today we are pleased to announce that Google is joining together with Yahoo! and MySpace in the creation of a non-profit foundation for the open and transparent governance of the OpenSocial specifications and intellectual property.” Good move; I’d personally love to see this happen with Google Gears.

Posted 25th March 2008 at 2:51 pm

Tagged google, googlegears, myspace, opensocial, yahoo

3 comments

Having been personally involved with this process, I know that going the foundation route is rather heavyweight for most purposes.

What did you specifically have in mind that would be addressed by a foundation for Gears? I'd be happy to help out here.

DeWitt Clinton - 25th March 2008 17:59 - #
I don't think there's any need for a Google Gears foundation. Most of what Gears does is being standardized in HTML5.

Ryan King - 26th March 2008 00:43 - #
Gears is really important - and it's open source and developed in the open, which is brilliant. So far though it doesn't seem to have achieved massive adoption. Personally I believe that having "Google" in the name of the product is a disadvantage - it makes it less likely that Google's competitors will support the effort by developing applications for it or helping to distribute it. The OpenSocial foundation seems to be designed to reduce this kind of problem with regard to that specification; I'd love to see similar steps taken to make Gears seem less of a Google exclusive initiative.
Simon Willison - 26th March 2008 12:56 - #