Re: Designing Lisp from scratch

 
In a message dated 3/21/07 11:45:49 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
[email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected])  writes:
 
>You could have a commercial version alongside av open source  version
>(MySQL, Qt, Sleepycat) or you could simply close future  versions
>(Sourceforge).
>
>- --- Vladimir
 
Most of the founders of these programs apparently have managed to remain  
more or less at the helm of the companies that market their product, which is  
the way I'd want it.  MySQL claims 4 thousand paying licensed users and 4  
million open source users.  I wouldn't mind something like that  either.  I did 
however notice that they offer 24/7 support.  They must  have a small army of 
programmers and consultants.  If at the beginning  stage, I start by myself, with 
the nature of open source what's to stop a  company with a ready pool of 
programmers, consultants and marketing people from  eclipsing me and generating 
all the revenue for themselves?
 
Closer to the topic of this group, I looked at authors of successful open  
source programming languages.  From what I can gather so far (Wikipedia,  and 
their own web sites), they don't appear to be making a living as directly  from 
the products they created.  As far as I can tell (which could very  well be 
wrong) Larry Wall (Perl), probably makes his living writing books about  Perl 
(I'm not too enthusiastic about writing books at the moment).  Rasmus  Lerdorf 
(PHP), has had to maintain day jobs, and do consulting, and write  book(s), and 
he served on the board of a few companies that went under.   He's now at 
Yahoo, and presumably should be remunerated well, though I don't  know how his 
earnings measures in proportion to PHP's popularity.  Guido  van Rossum (Python) 
seems to have cycled through several day jobs at other  companies.  He's now 
at Google, which is nice to be sure, and he even gets  to spend half his time 
working on Python.  These people may very well be  quite satisfied with how 
things have turned out, which is of course what really  matters.  For me, it's 
still more fun if I can generate my income more  directly from something I 
created, especially if it becomes sufficiently  popular.
 
In a message dated 3/23/07 10:00:01 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
[email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected])  writes:
>> The  most immediate danger is that once the genie is out of
>> the bottle,  there's no putting it back in, even if I find
>> that I could have done  better without going open source.
 
>I'd like to see this articulated without a metaphor.  I don't  think
>it's right, but I can't be sure what you mean.
 
Netscape, which started this whole Open Source flavor of free software,  
comes to mind.  It may already have been doomed, but going Open Source  seems to 
have only accelerated and cemented its demise.  Once the code was  available 
for people to look at, developers apparently found it too difficult to  
maintain, and lost confidence.  Once released, there was no way of  un-releasing it 
and going back to the way things were before.
 
Though I'm not inclined to go the Open Source route, I'll still keep an  open 
mind about it and I can adapt as circumstances warrant.
 
 
Daniel Corbier
uCalc Language Builder
_www.ucalc.com_ (http://www.ucalc.com) 
 




************************************** AOL now offers free email to everyone. 
 Find out more about what's free from AOL at http://www.aol.com.