[Ticket#: 2006040510000641] Re: [OT] Articles to read

[Marielle Lange]

Dear Jacque,

I was very surprised to read about "The IDE guys use Rev like anyone  
else to work on the IDE"  given how unoptimized the code of the IDE  
is and the problems there are with objects as basic as table fields.  
I was even more surprised to see you write that "Runtime also takes  
consulting work, and all of that is done in Rev too". Sure, everybody  
suspects so... but I was surprised to see you write it as it's not so  
good to remind the customers we are that the company that is supposed  
to provide us with a great application development software put  
themselves in the role of our direct concurrents. It creates a  
conflict of interest by which the thing to do to secure their  
competitive advantage as consultant is to develop better tools for  
themselves and not release them (the exact opposite of what you  
expect them to do as developers of an IDE).

That point was made by Lynn, a few years ago, in response to a post  
from Scott Raney on the RB list ;-)

On Wed, 11 Jun 2003 "Lynn Fredricks" <fci at europa dot com> wrote:
http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/realbasic-nug/2003-06/ 
msg01512.html

 > One thing Ive found in talking with some companies that sell  
scripting
 > products is that they often generate significant revenues off of  
custom
 > development. This has sustained a number of products over the years,
 > even though very little investment has taken place to upgrade or  
promote
 > them. However I think this isnt healthy as:
 >
 > 1. It puts the vendor in direct competition with their own customers,
 > other developers.
 >
 > 2. It often means innovations that should appear in future  
versions of
 > products are often not released because it provides a strategic  
value to
 > the vendor to not allow their own customers, or should I say
 > competitors, access to it.
 >
 > 3. Tool selling needs promotion like any other. If your goals are not
 > almost solely product oriented, then the tool almost never becomes
 > pervasive nor the market sustainable in a healthy, competitive way.

On the other hand, it is not really fair, as it is easier to make big  
bucks with an applications that targets a specific market than with a  
generic application designer one. Maybe we can somehow "compensate"  
them for spending more time working for our benefit alone by doing  
what we expect them to do, share publicly some of the tools or re- 
usable components we may have written in the context of our  
consultancy works.  The advantages of open source is that it can be  
extensively tested early on without the bugs being the responsibility  
of runrev alone, and when stable, if quite popular, it can come to be  
integrated within the official IDE.

Incidently, Richard Gaskin proposed to work on the creation of Rev  
Open Source Editor, by the very cute name of ROSE, as a way to help  
define/refine frameworks for components interoperability with runrev.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/revInterop/message/403

Marielle

PS. Humble library file processing functions available under a simple  
attribution license (free to copy, distribute, display, and perform  
the work; to make derivative works; to make commercial use of the work).
http://codes.widged.com/?q=node/658


------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--------
Marielle Lange (PhD),  Psycholinguist

Alternative emails: mlange at blueyonder.co.uk,

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