Where does open source live?

Not the place. The Wiki. (Not the vase, either, but Wedgwood's Portland Vase was an important milestone in the Industrial Revolution, the first mass produced copy of a real antiquity that was as beautiful and collectible as the original.)

Portland, the software, is a set of common interfaces for GNOME and KDE, the leading desktop Linux GUIs. Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE. Red Flag and Xandros are all going to ship Portland with their next releases.

Desktop Linux has always been hampered by the lack of a common stack which application vendors would port to. Such systems reach offices through a "killer app," specific to the business, bought from a software vendor. But the sale is made harder when every other application must go through a complex dance of OS and GUI compatibility before being installed.

Portland is designed to change all that, creating a common interface as easy to use as Windows or the Mac. The question is whether it will turn out as well as the vase did. What do you think?