Ground Control to Revolution

[Peter Alcibiades]

Scott writes:-

"Two thumbs up for commercial solutions and not some half baked, half whacked,
half completed and half bug tested open source "solution" that the author
may or may not get back to finishing one of these days... maybe...if I feel
like it, which phase is the moon in, who won the world series, heck I'm no
longer interested and the project withers and dies."

This attitude worries me more than anything that has come out of the Rev 
community since I started with Rev.   People really do not seem to understand 
what the nature of the open source competition is.  Its baffling, this degree 
of ignorance, and its deeply worrying.  The competition that will destroy 
your product is the competition whose existence you spend your whole time 
denying and refusing to look at.

Lets say that things carry on with Rev as they are now, for Linux users, into 
December of this year, or six more months.  

The documentation will still be a work in progress, abandoned half-baked in 
June 2006.  Linux users will still be stuck on 2.6.1 with no idea when or 
whether they will get an update to the main stream.  Not so much half-baked, 
as rather stale.  

Meanwhile, Python (and all the other open source alternatives) will be moving 
on.  Python is and will remain professionally documented, with half a dozen 
excellent tutorial and reference texts, electronic and paper.  Hetland's 
book, for instance, is what Dan Shafer's book should have become had it gone 
to a second edition.  Its one of many.

Python is now, and will be, up to date on all platforms, it has super easy 
database connectivity, not using ODBC.  It has a choice of a dozen super 
editors.  It has lots and lots of libraries and code snippets available for 
use.  It has several excellent gui kits, well maintained and up to date.  
Stable and development versions are available, kept clearly separate.  
There's no bug mountain.  No, it will not have split into multiple 
incompatible undeveloped variants.  It hasn't in years, why should it now?

I really like Rev, I like the Hypercard roots, the people, the community, the 
ease of learning, the flexibility and speed of getting stuff done in it.  I'm 
not advocating moving to Python and don't want to. Python is a lot harder to 
learn, maybe also to use.  But my goodness people, wake up and look at what 
is going on in the world outside.  It is not the way you think it is.  You 
are becoming your own worst enemies by burying your heads in the sand.

By the way, while you are en route to python.org to check it out, think for a 
few moments about how you get there.  You might use Safari, which started 
life as the OSS Konqueror.  Or the OSS Firefox.  You might use DNS, 75% of 
which probably runs on OSS BIND.  The pages might be hosted on the OSS 
Apache.  A majority are.  You might post comments, which will be relayed by 
Sendmail.  Many of the hosts you use will be running one or other Linux 
server distro.  Also OSS.

Still think OSS is all half baked, phase of the moon stuff?  Sitting at my 
Debian desktop, shaking my head in disbelief.  Where do these ideas come from?

Peter