That would be a really good way to lose a lot of personal investment,
innovation, and opportunity cost required on my part over a period of
several years.
I can understand where you are coming from. Maybe one of the ways you could
contribute is to comment on the various aspects of the framework and tell me
where I am doing things right and wrong?
About the only change required to deploy that program as a "Stateful
Business Logic Server" under our portal instead of a traditional CGI
interface would be to replace your call to QtmhWrStout, with an equivalent
provided by our framework.
So does your stateful business logic server communicate with jobs via data
queue? Or do you have another mechanism since it seems you may have written
your own HTTP server? This is the piece that I have an idea of how to
write, but would love to have the code donated (hint, hint :-).
What would you think of integrating ExtJs, Mihael Schmidt's service
program, and our portal under a traditional commercial license?
In the end I am hoping for many to use this framework for both in-house and
commercial use. Obviously anything done to the GPL'd code would need to be
resubmitted back to the core repository, but you could use the framework
within a commercial app (I am hoping people do - the more use the better
IMO!). I know that is a hangup for some (i.e. requiring the resubmitting of
code to the community for RPGUI specific source members), but we don't
really need yet another commercial RPG web framework - there are 10+ already
out there. My goal is to have something catch on fast for the benefit of
IBM i + RPG to not only survive but thrive in the next 10 years (yes, I am
dreaming in color). That can only happen if we start adhering to how other
communities have had great success: free and open source.
Nathan, to be perfectly honest, if this thing takes off like I hope it will,
then anybody that is a significant source commiter wont have any issue
finding work (in comment to your personal stake in submitting code). There
are a lot of AS400 companies out there that aren't afraid to open up their
checkbook and pay three digit hourly wages to someone that knows what
they're doing (personal experience in the 5 years I have been a vendor).
I had a call with a guy last week that has a similar private framework with
similar concerns. We had a GoToMeeting session and he showed me what he is
doing with his 100% RPG web framework (quite nice I might add, and has
similar flavors to RoR). He wants to play a part in what is going on, but,
similar to you, has a lot of personal investment in his code base and
doesn't want to just throw it into the open source world and have nothing
become of it. He plans on getting back to me in late January with a
decision.
In the end there are a lot of stars aligning right now. This project has
initial funding, it has multiple "media outlets" to get the word out (i.e.
articles with IBMSystemsMag.com, YiPs website, and conference sessions
everywhere I go which is about 7 to 10 conferences/usergroups a year), it
has a solid GPL v3 code base that is now in SourceForge.net (
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rpgui/develop), it has a highly passioned
driver (me :-), and now I am just waiting to see who else will join into the
mix and partner hand-in-hand.
Thoughts?
Aaron Bartell
On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Aaron,
It would be to risky for me to offer an open-source license to my Web
application framework. That would be a really good way to lose a lot of
personal investment, innovation, and opportunity cost required on my part
over a period of several years. But we do offer a traditional commercial
license to our Web Application Portal and programming interfaces for a
reasonable fee, which would be a fraction of the cost of developing
something comparable on one's own.
I looked at your RPG example which generates a JSON formatted stream using
Mihael Schmidt's service program. About the only change required to deploy
that program as a "Stateful Business Logic Server" under our portal instead
of a traditional CGI interface would be to replace your call to QtmhWrStout,
with an equivalent provided by our framework.
What would you think of integrating ExtJs, Mihael Schmidt's service
program, and our portal under a traditional commercial license?
Nathan.
midrange.com
