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New user? Wednesday, March 26, 2003
Plone Sprint in Victoria
ZopeZen: Plone Sprint: Victoria
A Plone Sprint in my home town? Where would they hold such an event? Oh... my house. Um... okay. ;-)
Victoria is beautiful in May. See-ya then!
Albertan separatists are idiots
Alta. should secede and buy nuclear subs: separatists
"One of the things that was suggested would be a couple of nuclear submarines moving around the world," Bruce Hutton told a news conference Tuesday. "That makes us a formidable power. With the amount of money we've sent to Ottawa in the last six years, we could have nuclear submarines."'
A couple of nuclear submarines would Alberta a formidable force?
Yes, that makes a lot of sense... a land-locked state with nomadic nuclear submarines that it would have no place to dock or resupply without some kind of foreign cooperation, and no means to defend the state whatsoever.
I think it's safe to say Alberta won't be seceeding any time soon. (Note: I've never met an Albertan separatist, despite living there for more than half of my life)
Project WOnder 1.0.1 released
Project Wonder: [ANN] Project Wonder 1.0.1 release
I missed this announcement, it happened on March 15th. Project Wonder is a massive (in size and quality) collection of frameworks for use in WebObjects applications. Much of the core derives from production-level frameworks open-sourced by the NetStruxr development team shortly before it went kaput, but since the start of Project Wonder, many excellent new frameworks have been contributed, and the core frameworks have been greatly improved.
Congratulations to the entire Project Wonder team!
VoodooPad is for real
I'm addicted to VoodooPad after using it for only two days. This afternoon I hit the limit of 15 pads for the unregistered version, and the application popped up a dialog to tell me so.
I immediately clicked the button to go register my copy, and bought two licenses. A few minutes later I had my registration number entered and I was able to continue expanding my VoodooPad document.
If you haven't tried it out yet, please do. It's such an intuitive and useful application. I'll sure I'll continue using OmniOutliner for structured writing, but the live Wiki mode is really great for me stream of concious writing and building up an organized (but unstructured) set of information, which is a mode I work well in.
Source License for Commercial apps?
Lately I've been wishing I had a source license for some of the closed-source Cocoa applications I use on a daily basis. I'd like to be able to add personal features without having to wait for the vendor to add them. I can hear some people saying already, "AppleScript", or "Services menu", or "contextual menu plugin". No, no, no. I want fully integrated features, not disjointed scripts in languages I'm not proficient with. Given the opportunity, I can write features seamlessly into the application directly using Objective-C, and to me, that's a lot more productive and gives better results.
Most of the things I'd like these apps to do are things that are too specific to be useful to a broad audience, and are unlikely to be implemented otherwise. But then again, if they are useful features, and the vendor would like to merge my private improvements into their app, they could license that code back from me, saving them from having to do the implementation from scratch themselves. But that's not a serious part of my motivation... I just want to be able to make these applications do all the things I want them to do.
I'm not looking for a way to make a custom version of an app and redistribute it. I'd certainly want the right to be able to say what I've done with my copy, but not necessarily be allowed to redistribute my changes publicly. I guess that all depends on what the vendor is comfortable with allowing.
So why not use an open source application to begin with? Well, I do use open source applications, but for the apps I'm wishing source licenses for, I would not seriously consider abandoning them for weaker (or non-existent) open source alternatives. Not to mention I do like to support developers! I don't hesitate to register software when I plan to use it. Sometimes I even register software before I try it... for example, I registered CodeTek's VirtualDesktop product before I even downloaded it. Unfortunately, I found the application didn't meet my needs at the time, but since then, the product has improved immensely, and I believe that my early support and the support of others was what funded those improvements.
I do not think that many closed source vendors are necessarily against letting users license their source. I don't think trade secrets are the reason the apps are only shipped as binaries. I think developers want a fair reimbursement for their work, so they can achieve their goals, personal and business.
I do think that a source license is worth a lot more than a binary license. How much more? Not sure. But 2-10 times more seems realistic and reasonable to me, depending on how much the application cost to begin with.
Realistically, the market for source licenses is small indeed, and the risks very high, so I imagine developers get a little squeamish thinking this. It would certainly suck if someone were to publish someone else's proprietary source, and it would be hard to find out who did it. Personally, I would be happy to sign an NDA and whatever other legal documents (within reason, and nothing that would harm my own livelihood) to make a vendor comfortable letting me have access to source code.
So, what apps do I want source licenses for?
NetNewsWire
VoodooPad
OmniOutliner
Sid
Your thoughts about this?
Monday, March 24, 2003
Friday, March 21, 2003
WWDC moved to June, SF
Apples Worldwide Developers Conference Moved to June 23-27 at Moscone in San Francisco
Oh my. Can you imagine how many people have already made travel plans for going to SJ in May? There are going to be a lot of pissed off people about this.
