Open source WO - offer

Hello Ashley,

>Open sourcing WO is not a good thing for Apple and won't happen - it
> will cost them more than the return on that investment
> and is not in- line with their general business strategy.

I don't follow you here: The base case with a closed WO 5.3
also costs Apple money every day.  WO is free today, no revenue for Apple.

Where is the return on investment with WO for Apple today ?

I could follow your argument as long as WO was a product with a price tag
and even when it was part of Xcode (= Mac hardware needed to develop for WO).


[The Apple statement is now online regarding the future of the WO toolset]

Soon the tools are deprecated, so a (new) WO developer will most
likely use WOLips/Eclipse...he can do that on Windows if he wants to.

So the "hybrid" situation will soon be: We have *opensource* tools
provided by the WO community for a closed, but free runtime product.

How does that fit ?

The business case for Apple if open-sourced has 5 distinct advantages
over the status quo (after WWDC 2006) IMO:

________
# 1: Better WO Marketability in the Enterprise, Investment Safety for
Customer (no Apple consumer brand image attached)

# 2: Community bug fixes in WO, which in return helps Apple.

# 3: Thriving WO Community instead of Shrinking Community. Provides
better Resources and Human Capital for Apple in the future (Hiring for
iTMS etc.)

# 4: Faster adaptability and release turnout in response to trends
(eg. recent ones such as AJAX)

#5: Growing competition from opensource alternatives (app server from
Sun, IBM, JBoss and languages such as Ruby on Rails etc.) narrowing
WOs lead
_______

The only advantage if *not* open-sourcing WO after WWDC 2006 is # 4
mentioned above. Since Apple no longer provides tools, they can focus
and allocate more resources to the runtime and just support the
community tools.

Now isn't it funny ? That's open source development right there with
the WO tools future  !

Why stop at the tools long-term ?

Marc