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Excellent stuff, and this is something I have been thinking about for some time. I'm also a big Thomas Kuhn fan, kudos for bringing that into this. We are in the middle of a shift, not simply open source but information technology. This is the kind of thinking that is going to move us forward. I think the comments to the article, esp on slashdot, are showing that a lot of open source guys don't get this, to them it is a MS vs. Linux thing. I have been striving to implement user control over applications in my own solutions. It is also a key insight that content generated organically through normal usage actually IS the heart of the app. for me this is actually a selfish thing, because I want the users to create the reports and such that they need without my intervention, and this has proven successful where I have put it in place for people.
I think that the focus needs to be expanded from the SOURCE being open, to the entire SYSTEM being open. The system includes the contribution, the innovation and knowledge of every stakeholder. To the extent that they allow users to contribute material, that is the genius of Amazon and slashdot, and it is why they are successful. Some stakeholders are programmers, some have a knack for interface design, some are data entry people, some are data overseers, and need complex overviews of large segments of data. If the system frustrates or ignores the talents and interests of ANY of these users, it fails. Thus a software system is not comprised of the network, nor the app, but the PEOPLE who use these things. The system should simply provide convenient tools to allow people to do their thing, to follow their genius, tools that THEY quickly understand and use intuitively.
Mere open SOURCE is closed to many of the stakeholders in a system, simply because they do not perhaps know how to use regular expressions or write a multi-join SQL request or whatever. We need open SYSTEMS, in which the people who need certain things from the system can create the interface to do so.
Then the question becomes, how can you make a living off of such a thing. Are we even taking the expertise of programmers, as well as their ability to create the software, off of the table as a means of income? Not at all, the source of income needs to be where it should be, at the point when someone is obtaining value from the system at the expense of someone else's time or expertise. Time and expertise are not only in the hands of programmers. It is, after all, a computer system; computers excel at maintaining lists of times and usage characteristics and users. Google's ads are a great first model of what is possible with sensible tracking of usage-based revenue gathering. This could be so much more sophisticated.
However, I envision networked or web apps in which the interface itself is easily created and manipulated by a normal (non-programmer) user, gathering and contributing to data hosts as if every source were part of a giant relational database, using tools perhaps to manipulate xml/xslt without needing to know how to create style sheets from scratch.
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