Google has announced that GWT 1.3 RC is now completely open source under the Apache 2.0 licence.
This coming right after Yahoo released their User Interface Library and Tibco their General Interface AJAX Library under an open source BSD licence (though GI does have a commercial licence too) seems to indicate an interesting trend in the industry. That's three big names in rich web application development choosing to go open source in the last year.
Of course, there is open source and open source. One kind has a community contributing to it (scriptaculous, dojo), the other does not. The question is how far toward the community model are each of these projects prepared to go and if they see any value in making such a move.
A quick look at the GI website showed no obvious links for those interested in contributing. Yahoo and Google are rather more 'open' as their source is available for checkout from their Subversion repositories on Sourceforge and Google Code respectively, with very clear directions on how to do so (well, actually the instructions are from Sourceforge and Google Code but whatever). They however cannot yet be categorized as community projects. Indeed in contrast to, say, scriptaculous' large and lively community of contributors and clear instructions on their wiki on how to contribute, the most active community participation on the others seems to be in the user groups.
I took a look at YUI's patch submissions on sourceforge and there were a measly dozen or so patches contributed. GWT is way too new - we'll have to wait and watch. And like I said, there seems to be no obvious way to contribute to GI, though Tibco does have a developer network where they ask users to contribute to the discussions and feedback.
Update: 20061215, 0905
As Kevin Hakman from Tibco points out, GI is being rolled out in three phases, the last of which allows contributors to submit their code. I suppose this puts GI in the same 'wait and watch' category as GWT.
Update: 20061220, 1930
I'm not posting past 3am again when I'm too knackered to research effectively. Read this page at the GWT site on how to contribute, among other things. Now I guess it's just a question of which one (or more than one) of these projects the community picks up and runs with and how much this benefits the project over and above the obvious one of bugs being spotted early.
2 comments:
TIBCO has this on the product download page (http://www.tibco.com/devnet/gi/product_resources3.jsp?tab=downloads)
Phase 1: Source code is provided with the download for use as a reference. The product and its source are free to use under a BSD license; Full support, warranty, and more is offered under separate TIBCO agreements.
Phase 2: Source compilation, compression and obfuscation tools will be provided so that you can generate optimized runtime code for multiple platforms from your modifications to the source.
Phase 3: Community contributions under separate contributor agreements for those that want to contribute their good stuff.
Looking for on-shore or off-shore programmers familiar with open-source Java development and the GWT
I'm trying to launch a database- driven consumer and business website as cheaply and as quickly as possible. The developer will take a reference application written in HTML and Javascript using RPCs to a Access-database backend and re-write it and complete it using MySQL, and open source Java tools and components, including the GWT.
Prefer at least two years of enterprise-solutions open source experience with Java and MySQL. Scalability is critical. Businesses and independent developers both welcome. Development to start ASAP.
It is believed that this project is in the range of $15,000 - $25,000 U.S. for an onshore developer. It could be cheaper offshore.
Any interested parties, please contact me at jerrympls@hotmail.com, preferrably with some references for your past work.
My apologies in advance if commercial postings are discouraged.
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