nanogui: Request for comments - Microwindows
Subject:
Re: Request for comments - Microwindows
From:
"Vidar Hokstad" ####@####.####
Date:
5 Oct 1999 00:38:13 -0000
Message-Id: <19991005003420.28637.qmail@mail.relight.com>
On Mon, 4 Oct 1999 18:17:13 -0500 (EST) you wrote:
>Aha. This makes things a lot clearer. I thought you were trying to
>market cool more-functional-than-Palm devices to end users, mainly geeks
>like me. ;) From what you've written, I infer that you are instead
>addressing the market of specialized embedded and portable applications
>for businesses (or rather developers for that market). Indeed, those
>customers and developers are unlikely to care a fig for open source.
That's true... Allthough you missed our market.. We're aiming for the
non-computer-owning public, mostly. Which make them care even less about
open source or not.
We will likely be making a "geek version" too, with developer documentation,
though. But it's not where we'll be making most of our money.
>In that context, Screenmedia seems less like a company that serves the
>Linux community directly (which is what I thought it was initially--
>must be my egotism ;) ) and more like an embedded-systems company that
>happens to have taken the opportunity to help out the Linux community
>while getting its own job done. In that light, the need for a closed-
>source-compatible license makes real sense (Screenmedia really doesn't
>have any choice),
This is about it. Our problem is the problem of any company doing embedded
systems: Many companies have solutions where their main advantage is having
spent lots and lots of money on optimizing their solutions to the extreme
(one example was a HTML 4.0 browser with support for CSS, _and_ a full GUI
in 250kb - it was too expensive, though), and those companies are understandably
extremely afraid of revealing to much information, since their entire value
is their investment in design and optimization of their code. Trying to
tell partners like that that we need them to link to LGPL'd code is futile -
they'd rather forego a big sale than risc anything.
>and I laud you for convincing the company to go open
>source in the first place, when it could have made as much money keeping
>nanogui proprietary.
Thanks.. I assume you mean keeping our enhancements to NanoGUI... Wouldn't
want to forget the people who have done the actual work so far :) It would
be nice with a proper "CREDITS" file in the distribution listing at least
the major contributors.
Our contribution now is that I spend a considerable amount of time updating
myself on NanoGUI, and are now allowed (and expected) to spend about 50%
of my time on NanoGUI and the NanoWidgets widget set. We'll also allocate
another developer to it soon, and we are paying 50% of the cost to get
a web browser ported to NanoGUI and NanoWidgets (for the forms stuff).
In addition, getting thousands of users on a NanoGUI powered platform will
hopefully help on developer mindshare.
Regards,
Vidar
