Inspired by Jon “Maddog” Hall’s statement at this year’s UKUUG conference that the network is built into Linux I asked myself: why is the network not built into any open source CMS as it is with Linux? Why is it so hard to connect them? Why are they still monolithic blocks of content management?

Obviously, developers of OSS CMS have not yet learned the lesson that Linux tells them: make networking a commodity! Yes, of course, we all do Web services now, yes SOAP or XML-RPC. Yes, there are RSS feeds, trackbacks, pingbacks. Good! A good start, especially in the Weblog community. Unfortunately, the quest for interoperability is as well just at its beginnings. Can we learn from the times when networking was built into Linux? Maybe it’s worth taking a look back at the discussions that evolved in the *nix community.

I will keep an eye on that in the realm of the CONESYS project.