"If there is one thing that I have learned from all this, it is that
Ben is governed by his will on this."
...
"Ben has blown a little hole in the dotLRN boat that we need to
concentrate on fixing so we can sail on."
- both Carl Robert Blesius (above)
Carl, here are a few more things that you, and others, may want to
take away from this:
1) OpenForce is not just Ben. There are two other developers (Yon and
myself) who worked on dotlrn and its foundations for over a year
now. And there are three other employees at OF who did not write code
but contributed significantly. So, whatever characterizations you
choose to make of Ben also apply to _us_.
2) If you mean that our decision is "willful", I find nothing wrong
sticking to the founding principles of our company i.e. writing and
promoting truly open-source software. We feel that we serve our
clients, the community we are a part of, and ourselves best by doing
so. You disagree with our decision, I respect that, but I assure you
that this decision was not taken lightly or impetuously.
3) Being one of the architects and builders of dotlrn, I would like
you to remember that we worked extremely hard to write it not only for
our client, MIT Sloan, but also for _you_. We didn't know at the time
exactly who you were. And you didn't know at the time that you would
want to use dotlrn either. Now we know and we are glad that you find
our work useful. We fought "the battle of the present versus the future" and the future won.
I wish you and everyone else success with dotlrn.
Disclosure: I work for OpenForce.
