Don't you just wish Rev would do this?

[David Bovill]

On 06/06/07, Scott Kane <scott at cdroo.com> wrote:
>
> From: "Peter T. Evensen" <pevensen at siboneylg.com>
>
> > Microsoft seems to be doing very well without open-sourcing its
> > development tools.


Google seems to be doing better with a business strategy based around open
source software.

On 05/06/07, Randy Will <randyw at uwm.edu> wrote:

I have to agree that Open Source is currently a fad in the tech market.  All
of the monthly rags are really starting to get into it.  On the other hand,
you have to give some value to the movement away from a completely closed
development model.

Disclaimer:  I am a cross-platform accessible software developer.  I am an
Open Source zealot.

:)

Don't under-estimate fads. There logic may suck - but a lesson I personally
learned (rather painfully) - is that the technological advantage of a
platform never beats the social logic of the people using it. In the
1980-90's it was IBM / M'soft trained engineers influencing technophobic
accountants against a technically superior platform. Now the "fashion"
element is more important with regard to getting a mind-share of the
development community - a significant part of which you can refer to with
the term "geek".

In my opinion, the big companies going Open Source are looking much more at
public opinion than technological advancement.  With everyone hating the
RIAA / MPAA / whateverelseAA, why not take a chance at making your company
look like you care about the little guy?  In my experience, it costs about
the same to develop software in-house as it does to Open Source it.  Given
the minimal cost differences, public opinion could be a cheap buy.

Public opinion has a little to do with it - but not directly in terms of
users. I have never met a "user" that "likes" open source. Companies want to
influence and attract developers and the developer community around their
products - the bigger ones like SUN / IBM are interested in the big
government contracts - and open solutions have a political USP there.


The reason that OpenRevolution could succeed is that there are interested
parties.  The reason it would almost definitely fail is that RR is pretty
well designed for low-effort programming.  Anyone seriously interested in
developing with RR doesn't have the time to muck around in a bunch of
C/C++.  That's why they're using RR.  GUI / RAD developers interested in C++
are already over at the wxWidgets camp and I don't see that changing any
time soon.

Very true. But again the aim of an open source strategy would be precisely
to attract those developers in order to add value to the platform. That may
not be easy, but without them the platform will die. In the age of open
source development frameworks, you have to be very very big or very very
clever to survive without attracting an extended and talented developer
community.

For some of the advantages this platform had - RunRev may now be too late. A
couple of years ago, all the open source widget / gui stuff was so awful
that an open source cross platform solution to their GUI nightmare would
have gained a lot of developer mind-set - in the age of AJAX and fairly good
widget sets the GUI advantage is rapidly becoming a disadvantage - watch Rev
get dragged into altBrowser territory more and more. Cudos to Altuit and
Chipp for that one - always ahead of the crowd.

Interestingly that is the way Adobe seem to be going with this:


   -
   http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:developerfaq#What_is_Apollo.3F