Open Source (was Don't you just wish Rev would do this?)

[Richard Gaskin]

Trevor DeVore wrote:

> On Jun 7, 2007, at 12:49 PM, David Bovill wrote: 
>> Its easy to say that RunRev is not Adobe, but I would be
>> interested in your thinking as to why RunRev could not make as good a
>> business out of open sourcing core parts of the C++ engine in a  
>> similar way to 37Signals or MySQL in its early days.
> 
> Just to clarify, Ruby on Rails (I assume that is what you are  
> referring to when you mention 37Signals) is a framework built for an  
> already existing development language.

I believe Ruby itself is also open source, governed by the LGPL.

> Someone could make an open source web application framework in  
> Revolution and would be doing the same thing as 37Signals in this  
> regard, though the underlying language would not be open source.  

Agreed; Andre's done some great work toward that end.

And since the engine remains free for CGI use, the differences for most 
folks are pretty minor.

> Revolution could even be the folks to do that if they wanted. It  
> appears to me (correct me if I'm wrong) that this would be similar to  
> the Adobe solution. Adobe did not open source Flex Builder, Flex Data  
> Services or Flash itself - just the Flex framework. At least that is  
> what I've read in articles discussing the topic.
> 
> But personally I don't think the Revolution language is mature enough  
> yet to venture down this road. The language is not extensible so the  
> beauty of the Revolution syntax breaks the moment you write  
> functionality not included in the engine.

On the one hand, we could ask whether we might get to that sort of 
seamless extensibility (SuperCard's Internals Toolbox had it in 1994) 
more quickly if we had multiple programmers working on it via an open 
source process.

But then on the other hand I can't find two more volunteers to do some 
pretty lightweight scripting on the MC IDE, so maybe not. ;)

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
  _______________________________________________________
  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com