I think you really should write this up more elaborately. There are lots of people like me who write software for a living and are, shall we say, unconvinced by the writings of Eric S. Raymond and the type. We need to read more, shall we say, considered viewpoints, that are not as simplistic as the evangelical style tends to be.

Pardon the expletive but it’s accurate, and even though this is the carpet bagging money grabbing swashbuckling pirate robber baron suit in me talking, we’ve all been around long enough to know that some members of this generation are more trustworthy (if not just downright better human beings) than others.

Actually I agree with you 100% on that!

The AJAX-style technology is irrelevant to the “web 2.0″ idea/business model, in my opinion — it’s just been lumped in by many people because a few of the more recent “web 2.0″ companies use it.

I have to disagree with you about the usefulness of “Web 2.0″ as a concept. Essentially it is really nothing more than a marketing “hold-all” for whatever is considered fresh and new in web-technology / web-business models. While many of the technologies and trends that have been more-or-less arbitrarily assigned to the web 2.0 box are themselves interesting, grouping them altogether under a common rubrik doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

For example, the Ajax stuff and the user-contributed-content stuff has pretty much no relationship (wikipedia, indymedia, blogs etc rarely use rich client technologies).

Amen. Probably in the top three reasons I’m loving this generation. Scares the hell out of business types though, they fear trust and “our fellow man.”