Friday, April 12, 2002

Way to Soon to Talk Bay Bridge Series...Right? The Giants are off to their best start in decades. At this writing, heading into a home stand against the toothless (2-7) Milwaukee Brewers, the Giants are 7-2, atop the NL West, with the biggest lead of any division leader in baseball except for the Indians. The A's, meanwhile, got off to a great start, faltered a bit, but remain a close second in the AL West, a game behind the favored Mariners. It's not inconceivable that the two Bay Area teams could meet in the World Series in October. Oh, yeah, it's way too early to start speculating, but it's never too early to savor the idea. In fact, MLB.COM's John Schlegel had a think piece on the idea a couple of days ago. Hey, we can dream, can't we? Discuss it 2:15:32 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Faisal Jawdat Thinks I'm Right...NOT! In an email response to Dave Winer's comments on my post about PythonCard vs. Revelation, Faisal Jawdat showed his delightful sense of humor. After saying he agreed with my observation, he added, "Now all that has to happen is for an Open Source development tool which is actually good to get created :)." Ouch. Good one, Faisal. 2:08:31 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

Was I Thoughtless? Maybe. In my earlier message about PythonCard vs. Revolution, I commented about the development tools world and suggested that if you aren't Microsoft and you're not one of the Java Jammers, then you probably don't have a shot in the dev tools market against good open source projects. That comment came to the attention of Dave Winer over at scripting.com. He suggested that perhaps I was just being thoughtless in that comment. He also said that "I think we're learning is that it's better if open source and commercial developers work together, Dan." Hmmmm. Off-hand, the only successful project I can think of that has involved the teaming up of open source and commercial developers in this arena is SOAP, a protocol Dave started and Microsoft adopted, helped extend, and then (in at least some peoples' views) managed to break by overloading it with unnecessary garbage syntax and requirements. But SOAP is still eminently usable, so it's not broken, and does provide a good example of cooperation between commercial and open source developers. Are there others? BTW, Dave also said that I had pronounced Revolution as "a goner." I sort of implied as much, but I'm still testing it. The jury remains out. There is stuff in it that isn't lying around on the ground obvious. And if it has anything going for it that's missing in what PythonCard ultimately wants to be, I don't yet see it. What it does have that PythonCard doesn't (yet) have is decent documentation and full cross-platform support. I didn't intend to trash Revolution and, by comparison, build up PythonCard. I really only had a single observation: doing something I thought should be easy in both places turned out not to be in one of them (the commercial product) and a piece of cake in the open source environment. I don't know how far that truth will extend. But it is a truth. Discuss this. 2:05:47 PM    Add your viewpoint [ comments so far]

© Copyright 2002 Dan Shafer.