Once more unto the void...

Once more unto the void...

What you really get on those Microsoft, Novell and Cisco courses...

This week, Monk and His IT Junk join Register Developer. Illustrated by cartoonist Jason Slater, Monk and fellow Brothers Mouse Matt and Norris do their best to come to terms with IT's ironies and frustrations.

The funny thing about those telling developers it's a new way of thinking and to "give everything away" or to "build it and they shall come" are often those making their cash using tried and tested ways of working.

That includes book publishers and events organizers, media giants fiercely protective of royalties and copyrights, software companies that charge using traditional - and expensive - software licensing models, and VCs that want a slice of the action for their funding.

Anyone still working in app dev who was around before BritPop will remember the debate on how the likes of Object Orientation and Corba were going to revolutionize distributed computing and the way we interact with systems.

If so, you should be heaving a "here-we-go-again" type sigh faced with today's wave of euphoria for Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and mashups.