On Sep 16, 2009, at 8:00 PM, Chuck Hill wrote:
but I can't think of anything else that might motivate them to make any significant changes.
Well the usual motivation is twofold: (1) to allow the product to evolve faster and cheaper because of community involvement and/or (2) to increase adoption which opens new markets and opportunities.
WebObjects is a curious beast with regards to the first point because Wonder fills that gap so well. This might be due to the incredible extensibility of the WO framework or a particularly exuberant community; probably both. Imagine if - for some reason or another - Wonder wouldn't have been able to implement ajax. By now Apple would've had to face either a large internal modernization effort or deprecate the platform because it would no longer be compelling. (In my opinion this is exactly the reason for OpenSolaris by the way.) On one hand Wonder keeps WO modern and relevant, but it also demonstrates that the core doesn't need to be open source for the community to extend and mutate the platform. Apple gets the benefits of community innovation without needing to open source it.
I suspect the other reason just isn't very compelling to Apple, playing the Red Hat or Sun role of providing commercial support for an open source platform. Certainly if they had any such ambitions we wouldn't have the dearth of WO documentation that we do now.
Here's the other thing from a developer standpoint...if they ever were to open source it, it would surely be APSL and not GPL so you could never borrow any of the code for anything anyway. Most Linux distributions won't touch the APSL (see launchd and bonjour). So really what would be the point? Just so you could recompile it? You can already override/replace almost any part of the framework. Or is there something in the current in the current license that's bugging you?
John _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Webobjects-dev mailing list ([email protected]) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [email protected]
