Farewell to CrunchPad and Open Design - Page 2
As first revealed today on Arrington’s blog, the deal has unraveled, or has reached a stage of unpleasant partner reassessment – depending on one’s sources and intuitions about the parties involved.
While the project never fully achieved the “open source design” originally conceived by Arrington in July 2008, one casualty may be the very concept of transparent, multi-enterprise design. As any married couple will attest, any partnership is fraught with risk. Compromise is the watchword.
But the open source design concept is one that deserves a better fate. While technology jobs in the U.S. decline at an unstoppable pace, Arrington, FusionGarage’s CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan, or both may have concluded that the U.S. legal system is a more fertile ground for cash than the imaginations of engineers on their own teams.
Whether the CrunchPad was a good idea or bad is the subject of much debate today, the crunching sound echoing across the net is not the sound of a tablet prototype being smashed. It's the cries of stifled open design.
Ironically, the day's news will be remembered for its enterpreneur-leaders who, for reasons yet to be fathomed, found themselves unable or unwilling to use omnipresent tools afforded by technologies the CrunchPad was supposed to exploit — to renew their vows.
"... if the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Photo Credit: TechCrunch.
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