Re: What could we do to convince Apple to opensource WebObjects ?
Re: What could we do to convince Apple to opensource WebObjects ?
- Subject: Re: What could we do to convince Apple to opensource WebObjects ?
- From: John Ours <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2009 21:38:11 -0400
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
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