If You Are a Developer, Your Application is Your Avatar.

I stole the title from Billy Marshall's article, Second Life for Server Virtualization because it is true on so many different levels. So are a lot of other things he said in the article, which - if I knew what SecondLife's architecture and code looked like - I could comment on in the context of SecondLife.

But, you see, Billy has a point lost very often on people which I think I can sum up in one line:

Quit calling it innovation if it's not; quit writing that you are innovating and innovate already.

Or as a crinkley green midget with big ears once said: 'There is no try.' Apparent translation problems caused another movie to have a quote, 'there is no spoon'. It's much the same thing. By not confining your thought into a receptacle, the thought doesn't have to be forced to the shape of the receptacle - in other words, one can shape the receptacle.

Point to ponder for anyone, really, but mainly developers:

...So why are you using all of the stale stuff provided in a general purpose operating system instead of branching out to create the perfect avatar? It’s akin to getting the girl of your dreams to say “yes” for an outing, and then wearing clothes from your dad’s ‘70s wardrobe, splashing on his Old Spice aftershave, driving his 1974 Buick Electra 225, and using all of his corny lines as your rap. Why would you do that? You wouldn’t do that, yet you accept the technical equivalent of this dismal scenario with the way you are building your virtual appliance – your avatar...

I suppose part of the problem is funding. People don't like to fund things that don't fit neatly into receptacles. Even open source falls under the sheer weight of dependency on receptacles.

There's much that could be done. Some of it might seem crazy and zaney, but it's the crazy people who bend spoons.