Bernie wrote: > Great! As I've said earlier, please keep me posted. Quite frankly I've > felt not much news have come from you about this. You almost got me and > Clarence (or was it Glenn?) worried what we should do in case you would > abandon Arachne. I can understand why you may not have time, but > remember that our patience might not be too long as well. I think mine > is, but I can't speak for the others.
It took me some time to "meditate" about my open source strategy. At the same moment, I was making reasonable amount of money (from my point of view, of course) from licensing Arachne (I am not speaking about individual registrations), and at the same time, I have moved completely towards using open source products (and not only personaly, but also in business - I am selling services GNU-based webhosting services to customers, and again, there are hundereds of them...) and power of open source development model is obvious. I even tried to release simple utility for printing Central European characters under GNU licenses - and instead of hundereds of confused e-mails from all parts of the world, asking "why it doesn't work?", and "how can I make it work?" or "please implement this and that" or "please fix this bug", I have received easy to understand patches, which fixed *real*, obvious bugs, and added useful new features. It is completely different world, where people know more than you, and you kind of "beg" to be allowed to participate in it. It is not really about money - except that one day, people who know how to do that, may be asked by users to implement this and that, as some kind of "shamanic service". This is why Linux users are slowly becoming "gurus", instead of "IT professionals" ;-) So strategy is obviouse: Flowerpot will be open source, easy to understand for programmers, and portable everywhere, while Arachne itself will remain more or less my "private" project. I think this is better that what Opera did, and maybe one day, I will release Arachne to be as open source as Mozilla is... -- Michael "xChaos" Polak +420 603 872631 / +420 2 33355668 / ICQ# 40434104 http://www.arachne.cz (Arachne Labs homepage) http://www.mp3records.cz (100% legal and free music) http://www.legalizace.cz (Stop drug war & release victims !) http://www.vojna.cz (Petice za zruseni vojny i civilni sluzby)
