On 8 Dec 2005, at 18:18, Richard Gaskin wrote:
My experience too - it has been the only way I have ever
succeeded interesting any truly bright under 25 year olds - the
main thing that puts them off is the lack of an open source
strategy. They go yeah this is great - but is it open source? Now
it does not need to be open source to convince them - they just
need to see how it can not just fit in, but be a Revolutionary
part of all those cool open source projects they are dying to get
their teeth into.
Okay, I'll bite: what exactly is an "open source strategy" for an
engine which is, and will likely remain, closed-source?
Nothing that dramatic. Open sourcing the engine is a clear no-no -
but some simple stuff would help. You have the beginnings of one with
the MetaCard IDE. Stuff like:
1) Clearly licensing code and stacks with an OSI compliant
license - and supporting a developer community around these with
suitable tools.
2) Hosting and therefore promoting these "geek style" - to key
open source communities.
3) Releasing the documentation and some or all of the graphical
content under a Creative Commons or similar license.
4) Marketing - use the words "agile development" a lot.
5) Sell, sponsor, and further develop the fact that Rev is
bundled with "open source" externals (openSSL etc).
6) Have an example - point to the productive use of Rev within a
large open source project.
7) Market some more - what's this about Rev and Red Hat?
8) Give some free licenses away to some cool kids in open source
projects.
9) Get the engine out there and installed on every Linux box
(apart from Debian) - team up with the right projects.
10) And just to be a little controversial - "open source escrow"
so that big projects can have confidence in small companies.
That I'd call Phase 1 - most of it is marketing a message directly to
key open source projects. Some serious things can be built upon this
- some of which could involve specific licenses, but mostly I'd think
of doing a project in the area of 8) & 9) - Dan's suggestion of
something in the AJAX community hits the right sort of bells. But hey
- why don't I come over and visit so we can talk about this over coffee?
_______________________________________________
use-revolution mailing list
[email protected]
Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription
preferences:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
