On Jun 7, 2005, at 12:07 AM, Ken Williams wrote:
I suggest going straight to Apple and pitching the idea of developing CamelBones for them.
Been there, tried that - three times now. The first time was before Jaguar's release; Apple opted to include their own in-house bridge instead. Again, before Panther, and again before Tiger. Each time, there was some interest - a lot of Apple engineers appear to like CamelBones - but not enough to push it through Apple's internal process to get it included.
To Apple's credit, they *have* provided me with free access to beta OS releases.
Or, set up a storefront and start charging some money for a "premium" version of camelbones, or charging a specific amount of money for support licenses.
I've thought about doing that, but I have my doubts. I was registered a couple of years ago to give a talk about CamelBones at O'Reilly's OSCON. Only three or four people registered for it, so it was cancelled due to lack of interest. O'Reilly had plans to publish a book about Cocoa/Perl development, but again the idea was shelved due to lack of interest.
Realistically, if a major publisher can't drum up enough interest to warrant a single talk, or one book, I don't think my chances of making a living from support fees are very good.
The primary use I imagined for CamelBones is for in-house databases, where it would be useful to be able to re-use a lot of the same code to build both web-based external interfaces and GUI internal interfaces. That space is filled with a lot of heavy hitters though - Sun, IBM, even Apple themselves, now that WebObjects is included with Xcode 2.1.
I've thought of writing standalone shareware apps. But nothing I've thought of has really cried out to be written in Perl. I'm not at all religious about languages. There are a handful of scenarios (like the one I mentioned) where having the option to use Perl in a Cocoa project is a life saver. But most of the time, the native language of the toolkit is the best choice - Tcl for Tk, C++ for Carbon or Qt... and Objective-C for Cocoa.
Bottom line is, CamelBones is a niche product. I've known that from the beginning, and I'm not complaining about it. It's a big enough niche to make CamelBones a fairly successful OSS project. But it's not a big enough niche to make a living, and making a living is what I need to focus on, at least in the short term.
sherm-- Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net Hire me! My resume: http://www.dot-app.org
