| Interesting issue/discussion.....
On the one hand, WO does not have the potential critical sales mass to warrant selling it as a supported product.
On the other hand, WO has so much strategic value that Apple can't afford to release it into the wild ?????
WTF.....
I know some economists who could have a blast discussing that one over a case of good beer.
But setting all the theory aside ...... If WO really is such a superior set of tools and libraries (Gentlemen's Club Membership aside), it would seem that Apple ought to be able to find a way to use it in the enterprise arena as a tool to support the whole "Apple Is More Elegant", "Apple Has Taste", "Apple Provides A Lower Total Cost Of Ownership" story ???
We all pat each other on the back regularly about the great applications we've built years ago that are still humming along and are very inexpensive for our clients to maintain. In other words, we don't do "throw away code" !!! We rarely have to "do it over" after we've done it once.
I just seem to smell a little profit center here.... Not necessarily in the direct sale price of the WO units that can be sold. But in the follow on sales of Apple devices that play well with WO. Microsoft has used their tools to cause unknowing developers to build HTML that only Windows (Internet Explorer) can interpret. I'm not suggesting that Apple do the same on the sly the way MS does/did. But clearly WO could be made to support features of iOS that don't have comparable counterparts in the competing mobile OSes.
It has baffled me for years that WO has not been treated as the high powered trojan horse that it could be.
But what do I know?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Joel M. Benisch CPCU, President 973-992-6300 x303 PaperFree Corporation 973-992-6666 FAX Livingston, NJ 07039-8249 WE CREATE PRODUCTS WE WOULD WANT TO USE!
On Mar 7, 2014, at 7:21 PM, Aaron Rosenzweig wrote: Am I right or what? WO is an elite “gentleman’s club” There are those “in the circle” and those outside.
If Mark wants to send a note of praise to someone, why not? Even if it is Tim Cook. Will anything bad come of that? It may fall on deaf ears but that’s ok.
Mark, I’m glad you love WO.
For those who may wonder, I’ll summarize what I believe Pascal is alluding to:
Even if WO sold very well, “well” would be a relative term. Compared to their other product lines, a good line of sales related to WO would mean nothing compared to Apple’s other product lines. How many developers are there in the world? Compare that to consumers.
Apple does not need to make other programmer’s lives easier on the server. It would be nice but there is no need (for Apple).
If Apple were to open source WO, it may mean they have less of an ace up their sleeve in negotiations with other companies when legal issues crop up. “You want to sue me for this? then I’ll sue you for your use of Key-Value-Coding so why don’t we just not sue each other ok?” Open sourcing WO could weaken Apple’s stance in legal battles for no monetary gain.
The ONLY way to open source WO would be to buy it from Apple… but even then… it would have to be a lot of money to make it worth the legal trouble of figuring out if that is a good financial deal for Apple.
I can think of a few cases where Apple technology was freed up to the world but in both of those cases they had strong supporters on the inside to make it happen:
1. Apple released it’s Smalltalk and core team to Walt Disney and Disney let it be open source:
2. Apple Newton’s “Dylan” language was released and became a commercial product for a while:
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