Don't you just wish Rev would do this?

[Andre Garzia]

I see only three reasons for anything to go open source:

1) To attract more users - For example, Revolution Enterprise costs about
600 USD which in turn costs about 1,030 of my Brazilian Reals, the minimum
wage is 404 BRL, students such as me earns less than that per month. For
example, my university pays an student-assistant the amount of 300 BRL per
month. Now if you make the math, while buying Revolution for business is
extremelly cost effective, a student will only buy Rev if he trully
undertands and appreciate the software. There´s no room for shareware like
impulse to buy. And  I´ll not enter the topic of piracy in here, anyone
wanting to know about piracy in Brazil drop me a note and I´ll send a pic
with what happens in front of my university. Truth is, student users prefer
OSS mostly because of cost, if it´s payware then piracy is a better option,
visual studio.net costs about 3 USD in front of my university.

2) To attract more developers - Making a big development pool and solving
bugs/adding features/porting. Most revolution users will stay away of C/C++
code so the question is, who will help manage the engine?!

3) To look cool and try to aim to become a standard - All OSS projects aim
to become important enough to become a standard, not in the sense of RFC and
IEEE but in the sense of thinking about a software category and matching it
with the software such as we do with Apache and Web Servers. There are a lot
of web servers out there but we always think of Apache, not because it´s
chepeast or the best but because thats a standard way to think.

I think everyone would like to RunRev to go open source but the question
remains: "how do we make money?". We should ask ourselves this question, if
I ask RunRev to open source the language, why I am delivering closed source
software? Let each of us try to delives an OSS project and think, how we
will pay our bills. I just received as a gift from google a nice book on
Open Source Software Project management, the author tries to answer the
question of how to manage a successful OSS project, it´s harder than people
think, specially if it involves paying bills.

Now that we know that in the short and medium time frames, runrev needs to
be closed source to pay their bills and all the ROI thing. Let us focus on
the three objectives above, attract more users, attract more developers,
look cool!

1) Attract more users - To do that RunRev needs to appear more in the media,
more articles, more software made, it needs to be on the spotlight. Also it
needs something more than a trial version, something that the wannabe user
might use and get hooked and think, I need to buy this. It doesn´t need to
be OSS but it needs that felling of: "I am paying nothing for this and this
is marvelous, if I pay for this it will become even better and I need to do
it". That was my felling with the Revolution Starter Kit. I could do things
but that scriptLimits was such an obstacles to all the things I wanted to
build that I could not stand it any longer. I think we need something better
than the scriptLimited starter kit, but a starter kit would be good.

2) Attract more developers - I use some niche operating systems that don´t
have an xTalk. I am very sad about that, I wish I could do something but I
cannot. I´d work, even for free, with rev to port the engine, even an old
engine, to such platforms, but since Rev is a closed source, I can´t do it.
What can be done? If runtime revolution could Open Source some parts of
hardware and operating system dependent code so that developers could help
porting the system to new hardware and OS. This I belive would not hurt the
company and could make we go back to the days of "it compiles even to
HP-UX". Also if we have a better way to create externals or a better way to
do FFI, we can add whatever we want to Rev, even if it is closed source.

3) Look cool and aim for a standard - Adobe did that with PDF and the Adobe
Reader. If the Revolution player was wide spread and famous, the internet
would be like a dream land beyond all the promisses of FLEX and AJAX.
Something like that would only be possible if rev had more users. That get
us back to the starter kit thing and marketing. We need something people can
download and make stuff, something better than time limited demo. We need
viral marketing such as blogs, podcasts and youtube videos, fun youtube
videos. Just launch RunRev, create a simple application on Mac OS X, build
for windows, transfer the files and run on windows, record the screens and
show that to a java guy, he´ll be in tears. The current flavor of the month
is AJAX, Web 2.0 and online apps. Show the world what Rev can do in those
camps or near those camps, give people a starter kit to start playing and
look cool.

I think that the only real advantage of open source software is that OSS
never dies. If a company behind an OSS folds, some group can take it from
there. RunRev appears very healthy so I am not afraid of that.

Again the above message is mosty a humble opinion of yours trully.

Cheers
andre