Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: "Open" vs. "Closed"

Author:Matthew R. Wilson
Posted:5/10/2000; 9:50:25 AM
Topic:"Open" vs. "Closed"
Msg #:17158 (In response to 17155)
Prev/Next:17157 / 17159

How about forgetting the lines in the sand. Everything's so blurry.

Exactly. The bottom line, IMHO, is that both the users and developers end up with what they want. For some people, open-source, GPLed projects are the only way to acheive this. I certainly do not have anything against that particular open-source model, but I can also attest to the fact that what UserLand is doing is just as effective in reaching that ultimate goal of everyone getting what they want.

I have spent the last few days working on integrating "Edit in Pike" functionality into my home-grown Perl web content management system. Now, I have all but one bug wiped out (well, there's two actually, but one of them is my fault and the other one is Pike's fault, so before long hopefully both will be fixed!). Pike can receive pages from my CMS, and it saves pages back to my CMS. Some of UserLand's documentation is still rough around the edges (i.e. return values not specified for all of the Manila XML-RPC methods, no documentation at all that I could find on the pike.* methods [I had to write dummy HTTP servers and clients to figure out the paramaters and such]), but UserLand's staff, Dave and Andre in particular, were very quick to respond to my questions and they both seem very committed to seeing other people, not just UserLand, be able to take advantage of this technology. To me, that is open.

And, like I said, there's the bottom line: it actually worked. I am using UserLand's software to talk to my own software...how much more open do I need things to be? Aside from those documentation problems, which I am confident the UserLand folks will take care of once more of this stuff shifts from "experimental/in development" to "final," I was able to do what I wanted as a developer, and also what I wanted as a user: I don't have to use IE textboxes to edit pages anymore!

That's open. Both in the software, and in the people who bring us the software.

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