> What OS projects are you thinking of? For Python, Guido van Rossum is 
> "benevolent dictator for life", and last time I checked Linus Torvalds 
> still oversees the patches to the Linux kernel. Larry Wall probably has 
> the last word about core Perl, and Slava Pestov certainly determines the 
> direction of Factor. Other projects like Eclipse and Apache are officially 
> committee-driven, but I'm not sure how strong e.g. the influence of IBM is 
> in these committees. So, having an "ultimate authority" is not unusual for 
> such projects. 

Surely Linus Torvalds and a few of other core developers of the Linux kernel 
oversee all patches. But on one hand they're not all hired and sponsored by the 
same company, on the other hand they mostly oversee patches and other 
contributions, rather than writing all the code themselves. This is IMO an 
essential difference.

I can see reason behind the decision not to integrate contribs indiscriminately 
into the qooxdoo codebase. I and the company I'm working for have no problem 
with 1&1 being in charge of qooxdoo. We are too small to add significantly to 
qooxdoo - we simply don't have the required resources. What I meant to say is 
that some larger companies might have a problem with using a framework to which 
they can't easily/more liberally add their contributions, and thus at least 
partially influence the general direction of development, but over which a 
company being a potential competitor has all the authority. Eclipse is open 
source, and so is NetBeans. Do you think IBM will ever use NetBeans, or that 
Sun will ever use Eclipse as a standard IDE for their developers?

There's a huge opportunity here for both 1&1 and qooxdoo, IMO. Sun managed to 
get Java where it is now because there was nothing like it at the time Java 
arrived, among other reasons. Qooxdoo doesn't have that much of an advantage, 
but still, all other potentially competing frameworks are a lot less 
programmer-friendly, and don't abstract the browser that strongly. Marketed the 
right way, I think qooxdoo has a good chance to become a hit, and the de facto 
standard for next generation web apps (just to use a few empty big words). For 
this, however, big players have to become convinced that qooxdoo is open to 
them on the long term, and not just free. Otherwise they won't put their weight 
behind it.

flj


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