On 06/06/07, Scott Kane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
From: "Peter T. Evensen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Microsoft seems to be doing very well without open-sourcing its > development tools.
Google seems to be doing better with a business strategy based around open source software. On 05/06/07, Randy Will <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: I have to agree that Open Source is currently a fad in the tech market. All of the monthly rags are really starting to get into it. On the other hand, you have to give some value to the movement away from a completely closed development model. Disclaimer: I am a cross-platform accessible software developer. I am an Open Source zealot. :) Don't under-estimate fads. There logic may suck - but a lesson I personally learned (rather painfully) - is that the technological advantage of a platform never beats the social logic of the people using it. In the 1980-90's it was IBM / M'soft trained engineers influencing technophobic accountants against a technically superior platform. Now the "fashion" element is more important with regard to getting a mind-share of the development community - a significant part of which you can refer to with the term "geek". In my opinion, the big companies going Open Source are looking much more at public opinion than technological advancement. With everyone hating the RIAA / MPAA / whateverelseAA, why not take a chance at making your company look like you care about the little guy? In my experience, it costs about the same to develop software in-house as it does to Open Source it. Given the minimal cost differences, public opinion could be a cheap buy. Public opinion has a little to do with it - but not directly in terms of users. I have never met a "user" that "likes" open source. Companies want to influence and attract developers and the developer community around their products - the bigger ones like SUN / IBM are interested in the big government contracts - and open solutions have a political USP there. The reason that OpenRevolution could succeed is that there are interested parties. The reason it would almost definitely fail is that RR is pretty well designed for low-effort programming. Anyone seriously interested in developing with RR doesn't have the time to muck around in a bunch of C/C++. That's why they're using RR. GUI / RAD developers interested in C++ are already over at the wxWidgets camp and I don't see that changing any time soon. Very true. But again the aim of an open source strategy would be precisely to attract those developers in order to add value to the platform. That may not be easy, but without them the platform will die. In the age of open source development frameworks, you have to be very very big or very very clever to survive without attracting an extended and talented developer community. For some of the advantages this platform had - RunRev may now be too late. A couple of years ago, all the open source widget / gui stuff was so awful that an open source cross platform solution to their GUI nightmare would have gained a lot of developer mind-set - in the age of AJAX and fairly good widget sets the GUI advantage is rapidly becoming a disadvantage - watch Rev get dragged into altBrowser territory more and more. Cudos to Altuit and Chipp for that one - always ahead of the crowd. Interestingly that is the way Adobe seem to be going with this: - http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:developerfaq#What_is_Apollo.3F _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution