Don, you are right, and we do make the committment to our TCL customers to support them. Believe me, we have plently of people familiar with TCL and ACS TCL versions and if clients want this support, we absolutely provide it. Like I said, there are a good 50 or more programmers providing ACS TCL services right now.
In addition (akin to my previous post), we would have a version of OpenACS that we've reviewed that incorporated changes that they needed.
We obviously can't commit to what the future of OpenACS would be
and, if we don't have our own "ACS Classic" path, as Ben puts it,
we obviously couldn't guarantee new versions of the product. Our
clients know this. To be honest, and I think it is quite obvious,
they were disappointed that there would not be an additional
ArsDigita supported investment in the TCL product above
the support we provide.
To one of Don's concerns, we bid our projects on the Java version. There was one client that demandedwe bid it as TCL, but this is the exception rather than the rule.
Ben, I had thought, was pushing us hard to make more and more use
of OpenACS and give OpenACS more recognition for doing so. I thought
it was a win-win situation.
Regardless of version, the (vast) amount of contribution to the community will be the same. If OpenACS focuses on the TCL community,
leaving us to use resources that might be spent their on making the
Java version better, that seems like a good way to go. I realize
that many of you might not use the Java version, but the open source code produced there will give a large group of people value.
We are making a significant contribution to the software world.
Also, ArsDigita is a business. It is also a business that contributes. There is nothing wrong with that. If ArsDigita is
able to make an open source business model work (and there
are a lot of challenges here), we'll be around to add more
and more investment into open source software. When all is
said and done, we've contributed and accomplished a lot.
A lot of the changes you have seen, like the move to Java
and MPL, have been motivated by the attempt to make this model work.
We do want it to work for you as well as us and are aiming to
strike that balance, but obviously,
not everyone will like all of the decisions. We do want others
to be successful and we do want to hear your feedback though so we can consider all the perspectives. It is a fact that ArsDigita's health as a business is one of those perspectives.
