There is plenty of profit to be made on top of an open source product. The fees IBM charge for their software pale in comarison to the consulting and hardware agreements they sign with customers. Making it work is the profit, not making it. There are far too many similar cheaper options for the software to be the profit driver anymore and IBM's marketing and sales models prove they know it.
I think with Sun open sourcing java there is going to be some strong pressure on MS with .net and IBM with Websphere and Notes to follow suit... and they'll all still make piles of cash.
If you do open source it, mind the bacwards compatibility you are inheriting. I personally would take the fork suggestion and release a version that didn't support anything earlier than R6, strip out all of the Rich text structure and code and hire Ben to write a new module in that regard. I'd pay for his time marketing support and consulting services on the lighter, cleaner and more standard compliant version. I'd also add Garnet back in and also add a PHP wrapper class. Pushing the underlying structure towards a library name space OO layout would allow users to pick and choose what they deploy or compile in to applications.
Oh yeah, the darn HTML rendering would get an update and have editable config files that would inkect the proper html / xhmtl enoding scheme on application load. And all java applet support would get the boot and be replaced with an ajax API.
@Dick
There is plenty of profit to be made on top of an open source product. The fees IBM charge for their software pale in comarison to the consulting and hardware agreements they sign with customers. Making it work is the profit, not making it. There are far too many similar cheaper options for the software to be the profit driver anymore and IBM's marketing and sales models prove they know it.
I think with Sun open sourcing java there is going to be some strong pressure on MS with .net and IBM with Websphere and Notes to follow suit... and they'll all still make piles of cash.
If you do open source it, mind the bacwards compatibility you are inheriting. I personally would take the fork suggestion and release a version that didn't support anything earlier than R6, strip out all of the Rich text structure and code and hire Ben to write a new module in that regard. I'd pay for his time marketing support and consulting services on the lighter, cleaner and more standard compliant version. I'd also add Garnet back in and also add a PHP wrapper class. Pushing the underlying structure towards a library name space OO layout would allow users to pick and choose what they deploy or compile in to applications.
Oh yeah, the darn HTML rendering would get an update and have editable config files that would inkect the proper html / xhmtl enoding scheme on application load. And all java applet support would get the boot and be replaced with an ajax API.
:-)