Why release Frontier as open source?
I explained the rationale for releasing Frontier as open source on Scripting News onMay 17, 2004. Here’s a summary.1. After I left UserLand in the summer of 2002, it became largely a company that markets and develops Manila and Radio. My concern was when will UserLand get around to enhancing and improving the “kernel” — the large base of C code that runs Manila and Radio — the scripting language, object database, verb set, server, multi-threaded runtime, content management framework. It’s been several years since there was a meaningful update of that code. By releasing the code, the hope is that we will be able to pick up work on the kernel and start fixing some bugs and adding some long-waited-for features.2. Products that Manila and Radio compete with don’t have their own kernels, they build off development environments created by others. For example, Movable Type is written in Perl. WordPress is PHP. Blogger is Java.
