Proponents of proprietary software believe that engineers who build robust platforms—and the companies that employ them—should be rewarded financially. These folks believe companies should also be allowed to hold their code close to their vest, never revealing it to anyone outside company walls.
On the other hand, open source proponents believe that in the world of technology, the path to increased innovation comes from sharing ideas. In many cases, this involves sharing code, too: In the open source world, engineers become part of an open community of programmers who are constantly trying to improve projects.
This communal environment inspires people to produce to the best of their abilities. And that production comes in a timely manner: Open source engineers are often able to use the code of other programmers as a starting point—a foundation upon which to build.
That philosophy is what inspired Meteor, an open source web programming framework that gives other programmers a starting point to build desktop-style applications that function in the browser. Currently, creating that framework might take months or even years, according to Geoff Schmidt, the developer who built Meteor. But it shouldn’t have to.
“The idea of Meteor is that everyone should have that stuff,” Schmidt explains. “It shouldn’t take a couple years to get to the market.”
Schmidt said that he and his colleagues had originally set out to make an app that made travel recommendations. But, as they went about working on that project, they quickly realized that the framework they had developed was more important than any kind of travel-related app they might have ended up with.
Though Meteor is still in its nascent stage—it’s just left its beta stage—many companies have already taken to building applications on it. This fact alone, Schmidt contends, reveals how pressing a need there is for his open source framework.
Meet Meteor, the Open Source Tool That Makes Building Apps Easier
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