Imagine a world in which HyperCard had been open sourced 20 years ago?

[David Bovill]

On 08/06/07, Andre Garzia <andre at andregarzia.com> wrote:

Good OSS is here to solve a problem. Usually a problem that is not
> being solved by the mainstream players. The good ones are also managed
> like a "enterprise", so again, what is the problem that an OSS RunRev
> would solve? I see nothing wrong right now.


While I agree that we live in a perfect world, and that open source
methodology builds on top of the need to scratch itches, I would not
directly conclude that open source is only their to solve technical issues.
Fundamentally open source has a track record at building large user bases
for software projects with small budgets, or alternatively to "dramatically
lower the cost of the acceptance of a language by a technical community".

Of course there are and have been things Id like to do with the source code
which I have not been able to take forwards or even experiment with the
possibilities... I think other developers would have and would have been
attracted to the platform if this were possible.

But mainly I'd like a larger developer community producing better and more
robust libraries that were free to play with and you could buy if you need
to close the source. There are reasons that there are very very few robust
developer contributed libraries in our community while there are good ones
in python and ruby, and OK ones in php. This can and should change, and a
carefully planned open source strategy would be a low cost part of that
change.