Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...
I spent some time tonight listening to Dave Winer's Coffee Notes regarding the open source release of Frontier. I remember when Frontier came out -- it was during my first Macintosh user lifetime. Listening to Dave's notes took me back to those days -- 3M Machines -- 1 MHz, 1 MB RAM, 1 MegaPixel display. And here I sit at 1.25GHz, 1GB RAM and more than 2M 24bit color pixels. I'm glad that Dave was able to convince UserLand to do this. There's been a ton of software over the years that's just died and gone away, which is real shame. That entire effect is one of the reasons that I want to see open source software succeed.
I'm curious to see the internals of Frontier. The integration of a scripting language and an object database is exactly what we're building at OSAF. The outliner in Frontier is a cousin of the ThinkTank/More outliners, which are still better than any other outliner (commercial or open source) that I've seen. Just getting a glimpse of that will be worth it.
I like the thought of Frontier as a message in a bottle for the future. I also wonder how many other bottles there could be if we could unlock some of the software that's died away. Symantec More? Apple Dylan? Symbolics Genera? Lotus Agenda? Common Knowledge Arrange?
Symantec More is at least available as a binary download from Daves outliner site. As is ThinkTank.
Symbolics Genera is still a valid product. You can buy it, you can get maintenance for it, you can even still get machines to run it on (both Open Genera and the native Genera!). I have a XL1201 at home and a two-disc-set of Genera 8.3, bought just some year ago :-)
The main problem with Symbolics is to locate Dave Schmidt, the guy who works for whatever company currently owns Symbolics - actually he worked for all companies up to now who owned Symbolics :-)
Lotus Agenda is a rather weird beast. It's quite cool - but what it did then is now done much better by TinderBox. Actually many of the ideas of Agenda can be directly translated into TinderBox ideas. But I still would like a Agenda install for my old HP200LX, it would a perfect software for a small DOS-based PDA.
Posted by Georg Bauer at Wed Sep 29 04:29:23 2004
Regardless of that, the more software that gets released to be read, the better. The more we can read, the more we can learn. Maybe Don Knuth's dream of software-as-literature will come true after all.
(BTW, Georg, Lotus has made Agenda binaries available for download, and various places around the net have repackaged versions for the HP200LX.)
Posted by Matthew Morgan at Wed Sep 29 16:06:21 2004
The ideas can be important. But those ideas aren't necessarily best represented in the code. If Frontier has a great outliner, you can probably understand that perfectly well simply by using the tool -- the particular implementation isn't that interesting. It could be interesting if it was an environment you could use, but that's unlikely. Not just because of the build tools and other details, but because a closed source codebase feels radically different than an open source codebase, even when other parts of the environment are common.
So I think good documentation and a working implementation are more important to preserving and expanding on ideas. Source that's open but unrunnable (e.g., The Humane Editor) isn't very interesting.
Posted by Ian Bicking at Wed Sep 29 22:42:10 2004
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