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

Re: Bento and OpenDoc

Author:David McCusker
Posted:9/10/2000; 6:53:11 PM
Topic:Guido and Richard
Msg #:21157 (In response to 21149)
Prev/Next:21156 / 21158

Todd Blanchard: Bento and the rest of OpenDoc - didn't CIL put that into the public domain?

Thanks for asking that. I get asked those questions now and then, and folks tell me the status of their personal inquiries directed toward Apple.

No, neither Bento nor OpenDoc were put in the public domain, and I recall no intention to do so at Apple. However, IBM has publicly said several times (and in places you can still find) that they plan to publish the whole kit and kaboodle for open use. But since this does not happen, I assume some old partner in the CIL business is being passive aggressive.

Most of the sources, including all of Bento, appeared on CD's for source level debugging purposes. In particular, you can find them in the DR5 release. But the license was not public domain (or open source).

Because I was once the Bento guy (read, the poor sap who had to cope with ongoing architectural issues in an existing body of code), I used to hear from everyone who wanted to license Bento but had run up against a wall when talking to Apple. I never heard of a single instance where Apple cut a licensing deal with anyone in the last five or six years. Now I tell folks the prospects don't seem very good when they pursue Bento.

Bento seems to be used by a few large companies in the context of older licensing deals. It works reasonably well on operating systems with good virtual memory, where the way Bento uses memory is not so noticeably atrocious.

I was writing a replacement for Bento when OpenDoc was killed (or put on maintenance, as Apple euphemistically said at the time). Before I was ready to reveal it, I sometimes called it Bento 2.0, but actually it had almost nothing architecturally in common with Bento at all. Then I told folks about Quilt just before Apple pulled the plug on OpenDoc.

I wanted to continue working on Quilt after I left Apple, because it was based on stuff I had been doing for a number of years, and I thought it was a good design. But I gave up talking to Apple about it after I was stonewalled for enough weeks that it seem fruitless to try any longer. That was when I decided to start over again in yet another generation of database code, which I called IronDoc.

IronDoc is still vaporware, and I can't work up the energy to hype it right this second. :-) It wouldn't be ethical to do so unless I'm actively working on the code, anyway. I have it on a back burner right now.

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