I'm not sure how an open monoculture is square one. If it becomes less than ideal to anyone, they can just fork it. Plus, you can't really shut down an open "One True Product" if someone can just use the open materials to start it up again.
The risk seems to be more in the camp of the company. If it's open, someone could undercut them more easily than if it was closed. So the onus is placed more on the ability of the company to continually add value through services or the kind of innovation that led to the product in the first place, rather than just protecting their IP.
Based on the article, it seems like this could be a perk for Google Fiber users. Man, I can't wait to see that service spread to more cities. It'll finally hold the existing providers' feet to the fire.
I wanted to pipe in to say the same thing. For the longest time, I thought my Late 2008 15" MBP couldn't handle 8GB (chipset issue, I though). I figured 6GB was the largest, and I just stayed with the 4GB as it came from the factory. Then one day late last year, I realized that a) the Late 2008 15" MBP can take 8GB and b) 8GB of RAM was now VERY affordable.
It made a huge difference. No more constant thrashing of the HDD as it tries to manage a large swap file.
At first glimpse, it seems a bit intense, but if it's what it takes for us to compete on a global scale, then so be it. I'd take it over the bigco where I'm currently at, if only so I could just continue to learn.
Unfortunately, Kiln was never an option for us. We are a git shop, and while I do have a lot of respect for hg, we just do not want to use it. But VCS integration in FogBugz was never the main problem.
We currently use FogBugz with GitHub (private repos) and it works very well. I wrote a bridge that connects both APIs together, so we get fairly good integration. Information about commits and branches gets attached to FogBugz cases and we get a smooth workflow out of it.
The problem with FogBugz is that it is slow and has a number of minor annoyances, which grow to be a pain in the long term. Such as Fog Creek refusing to make the software automatically mark "#1527" as a linkable case. You have to write "case #1527". Quite annoying, especially if you don't run your FogBugz installation in English!
There are other things, such as obsolete Windows-based character encodings they insist on using in E-mails sent from FogBugz. Also, hosted FogBugz is slow. We spend a lot of time waiting.
Oh, and the default "VCS integration" features in FogBugz are from the CVS/RCS era and they still haven't been modified, even though they sell Kiln. The "Checkins" field in every case is file-based, so there is no way you can attach modern DVCS changesets to it.
I reported all of the above problems more than a year ago, and nothing has changed.
All in all, while we do use FogBugz (and pay quite a bit of money every month for the pleasure), we are looking for alternatives.
At first, I thought it was pretty ballsy of them to open this all up, but then I realized that this isn't really where their competitive advantage lies. Plus, I think they probably felt that there was still plenty of room for improvement since it had just been a small team working on it (whereas I have a feeling that Google has a much larger team working on these things). In the end, the community wins by getting to see their designs, and Facebook wins by continuing to iterate on them as the community discussion leads to improvements.
