Open source WO - offer

As a final thought on the subject of WO open source, here's a
(pessimist) blog entry on the WO News from WWDC '06 I happened to pick
up through Technorati.

I liked the ship image to sum up my thoughts in this thread why WO
should go open source in the future after the tool announcements:

Quote with excerpts:

" Only one short year after making a significant investment into
upgrading and integrating WebObjects developer tools with Xcode, Apple
does an about face and abandons the tools altogether. Why go through
the effort to roll in the tools, only to throw them out shortly after?

...

With the deprecation of all Apple tools, opening of specifications for
such basics as EOModels and WOComponents, and an engineering focus on
maintenance rather than feature development, my biggest fear is that
WebObjects is now at a technological standstill. I highly doubt Apple
will invest resources to improve the processes and capabilities of
WebObjects in any significant way. And, the chances of the newer
Cocoa-based technologies being backported to WebObjects is essentially
nil. Although this wasn't actually said, I suspect Apple's expectation
here is the same as the tools: the community should pick it up. Except
here, Apple holds all the source code and it's not giving that up.
Nor, is there a way for the community to contribute source codes
changes to Apple for inclusion with the official code base. Open
source projects like Project WONDER have come up with some great
frameworks, like the AJAX framework, as add-ons to WebObjects. But,
lack of access to the core of WebObjects means long-standing bugs may
continue to go unfixed, and add-ons remain just that, without a chance
of being better integrated into the core of the system.

...

I'm abandoning ship, not because it's sinking, but because the bridge
crew is content with sitting around idly throwing deck chairs
overboard, while the other passengers are busy hammering together new
chairs (wood falls from the sky in this world) to go nowhere fast.
Sure, once in a while someone comes along and invents a spanking new
AJAX engine, but it has to be glued to the outside hull because the
captain won't open up the engine room. I truly hope I'm just
overreacting and WebObjects will continue to prosper and grow. But,
I'm planning my escape and will go through with it once everything's
in place. "

Link: http://wiredflux.com/blog/2006/08/27/webobjects-the-continuing-saga/


Marc