Short answer: If you can't afford to sponsor the development of an SDK or platform, look for co-sponsors. Those co-sponsors will only be willing to invest into the platform if the legal setting give them influence on the project direction, the decision making process, and if the IP and trademark created
Longer answer: 1) This is a good article on the economic case for an open source foundation: http://dirkriehle.com/publications/2010-2/the-economic-case-for-open-source-foundations/ 2) Watch Adobe: Adobe launched the Open Spoon Foundation http://www.spoon.as/ Flex will be handed over to the Open Spoon Foundation: "The Open Spoon Foundation was established in July 2011 as a Texas not-for-profit corporation dedicated to the public benefit." "In order to maintain an appropriate level of responsiveness with the community, this project will eventually need to have full-time resources whose primary responsibility it is to interact with and coordinate the volunteer resources. Given this need, and the potentially requirement to enter into contracts with other vendors and organizations, this project will be organized as a Foundation. This approach has clearly been the vetted model used by Mozilla, Eclipse and others. As the organization will exist as a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to the community, funding will need to initially be solicited through donation from companies vested in the success of this project and Flex in general. Initial inquiries have revealed a number of companies tentatively interested in this investment as an offset for the costs of their own framework maintenance efforts." How about donations by companies vested in the success of OpenLaszlo for the project? Would have made a lot of sense, at the time where there was still a significant number of companies involved with OpenLaszlo. 3) There's a lot of interest in good HTML5 frameworks: Success of HTML5 frameworks in the past weeks Strobe (creators of Sproutecore) was acquired by Facebook: http://www.strobecorp.com/ http://blog.strobecorp.com/?p=304 Sencha raised another $15 million in October: http://www.sencha.com/company/press/sencha-raises-15-million-in-series-b-funding-led-by-jafco-ventures/ Check what Strobe does: "Your users are everywhere–on desktop, mobile, tablets, and TV–and to reach them, you need to be everywhere, too. Why build many native apps when you can build just one multi-screen app using a standard web stack?" You can do all of that with OpenLaszlo, as I've shown with the Mobile OpenLaszlo initiative (Laszlo's CEO actually discouraged me to do any open source mobile OpenLaszlo work, just as a side note): http://www.flickr.com/photos/semanticmemories/4726937465/sizes/l/ Having such a capable technology as Laszlo has, and then failing to generate any media hype in the past 4 years tells us something about the quality of the management team. An open source foundation - established in 2009 or 2010 - could have made a difference. How is Laszlo going to respond to the fact that Flex will be handed over to the Open Spoon Foundation? A company which uses the Flex SDK so heavily should get involved with the foundation - if Laszlo had the money and a capable management. On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 1:58 PM, P T Withington <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2011-11-13, at 02:13, Raju Bitter wrote: > >> Ok, so they want to rid themselves of the development costs for Flex. >> If Adobe contributes the Flex SDK to an open source foundation, how is >> Laszlo going to continue the OpenLaszlo development effort? Laszlo >> should have done the same thing 2 years ago - when there was still >> enough interest OpenLaszlo, and most people with good knowledge of the >> technology still on-board. > > Not sure what you are asking here. OpenLaszlo is open source. What more is > needed to 'contribute [...] to an open source foundation'?
