In reading my last post when it came through, I realized it was a tad to
sparse, that the way it's worded it might be too easy to think the
question merely provacative:
>Who's funding the development? I imagine we're looking at an investment
>of a few person-years worth of effort, somewhere in the quarter million
>range of greater. Who's got that much free time?
The reason I ask is that I don't have a clear understanding of the
OpenSource process.
When I think about the task of making something as substantial as
MetaCard, it seems we're talking about something on the order of a
multi-platform sub-operating system, a task no smaller than Linux.
In my (admittedly limited) observations, the OpenSource success of Linux
is a wonderful exception, but does not appear to be the rule. Progress
at Netscape appears to be slow, commercial sofware sales continue to
rise, and the big companies experimenting with OpenSource seem to be
limiting their experiments to code which was largely OpenSource to begin
with (e.g., Apple's OS X Server _kernel only_). Yes, many companies are
making big investments in _Linux_, but not necessarily OpenSource;
ironically most of these big investments are for developing commercial
products.
When we consider the engineering challenge involved, the resources
required to just maintain something like SuperCard (a Mac-specific
xTalk), and then multiply that effort threefold or more to handle other
operating systems, my fear is that the task will not have been completed
before the necessity of paying bills forces it onto a backburner. I hope
I'm wrong, and look forward to gaining the perspective needed to
understand how it could work.
Historically, xTalk companies have been living on slender margins. To
date, only three survive: SuperCard, ToolBook, and MetaCard. Asymetrix
(ToolBook) was heaviliy subsidized by one of the world's richest men
until it's IPO last year; SuperCard, bless it's soul, has changed hands
four times and has lived most of its life in the red; only MetaCard Corp.
seems to have maintained sustained self-sufficient viability.
If slender margins have extracted such a heavy toll from most xTalks
before, how will OpenCard survive on zero, or more accurately, negative
margins? What is the business model of OpenSource as it applies
specifically to OpenCard?
- Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Tools and services for multimedia and internet developers
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