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Quite a few Google employees read slashdot regularly (and even post too!). Especially the "techguys".

It's really not an insidious cabal. Really. Quite a few quite prolific people would bail if the company started doing any thing "evil". There are too many principled idealists that work there that could get a new high-profile job in minutes if the evil factor was kicked up a notch.

I can't believe so many people bitch about Google not open sourcing 90% of their production software when, for the last 5+ years now, they've been the poster child for what's possible if you use open source.

Honestly, how many times have you had to defend Linux as being production-worthy by saying "Google uses it!"

It's just kind of sad to hear this angry rhetoric when it's quite obvious Google is facing many serious competitive threats in the search area (and elsewhere like email), such that the "secret sauce" of how the searching algorithms, clustering software, file storage, and production environment works are closely monitored by spammers and Microsoft and yet you demand the release of such algorithms for what? So you can run a 10,000-machine cluster at home and have your own search engine?

God you people are so petty and short-sighted. Google endorsed Linux. Google proved what you can do with open source. Google employs the original authors of the Gimp, the author of Python, the author of Subversion... etc etc etc and yet you're all so misguided as to accuse them of not being open source friendly.

Don't know if this (Sitecopy) will fit your requirements, but I like it quite a bit.

It's written in Perl, so it'll run just about anywhere. With Sitecopy & CVS, you could probably write some scripts that would make a pretty cool & portable content distribution system.

Dom

Well said. They should consider adopting modern methodologies and devising bolder strategic plans. This will leverage the synergy required resulting in a win-win situation.

I highly recommend they study Greg Stein's work on the subject.

You might also want to check out WebDAV which they are actively supporting. Apache 2 needs an extra directive.

Third, since it's well integrated into Windows 2000 and XP, it is really nice and easy to use. With WinXP you can even treat a WebDAV enabled host on the web to look and act like a local file system in all ways. This "redirector" support in Windows XP makes a lot of stuff possible.

True, WebDAV has great potential for being a simple, cross-platform NFS. It already has user authentication and encryption built in, and future updates of the protocol is likely to have access control and versioning (read more at www.webdav.org/specs/). But, you couldn't be more wrong about Windows XP. The WebDAV redirector implementation in Windows XP is incredibly broken, broken to the point where I'm beginning to believe the conspiratory theories.

Firstly, the WebDAV client built into XP doesn't handle digest authentication, forcing you to send passwords in the clear. Secondly, the user authentication is broken in a way that, AFAIK, makes it pretty much incompatible with Apache: When connecting to, say, http://host.net/myfiles/ as 'user' the XP redirector authenticates itself as user@host.net\myfiles' when it should only be sending 'user'. Strangely, while being clearly wrong, this works just fine with IIS, but breaks Apache.

I'm sure there's more, but that's what I've found during the last couple of days when trying to set up a WebDAV server so that I could share files between Mac, Linux and Win boxes easily.

Try taking a look at the number of messages detailing problems with WinXP at www.lyra.org/pipermail/dav-dev/.

It really makes me sad.

But even technologically, it is an error to confuse a scripting language with a system like .NET or Java.

.NET and Java are not even in the same class. One is a language. The other is a marketing buzzword that covers a variety of technologies. Be more precise. What part of .NET are you talking about?

Yes, Rebol, Python, and Perl are much simpler to program than .NET or Java. Yes, they run a few important things somewhat faster. But .NET and Java are natively compiled, fast,

In general, Java is bytecompiled, just as most scripting languages are. Sometimes Java can be JIT-ted to native code. Sometimes scripting languages can be JIT-ted to native code.

general-purpose programming environments with static type checking and large libraries (written in Java itself in the case of Java)

Java's library is not larger than CPAN and certainly is not larger than Jython's. The scripting languages originated the idea of large standard libraries. Python is known as the "batteries included" language. Java and C# (.NET is not a language) are relative johnny-come-latelies.

and that just makes them much more useful for large-real world problems. You see, another misconception is that the easier you make programming in a language, the more useful it is in real-world applications.

It isn't just about ease. Dynamically typed programming languages allow you to radically decrease your line count and all else being equal that reduces your original development cost and your maintenance costs. We could argue whether "all else is equal" but I think rather that I'll point you to some evidence that significant systems can be created in dynamically typed programming languages. Python case study, Using Lisp to Beat your Competition, Smalltalk in the Large

There was an interesting case study about it a while back. But was several years ago, and on a much smaller project. Now that Disney's getting into the action, Python will be more palatable to other suits.

Let's not forget Greg Stein's ViewCVS, a Python rewrite and improvement of WebCVS.

Sitecopy is a very nice little site-management tool that implements WebDAV uploading today.

It comes in a command-line version, or with a GNOME frontend.

(I don't know what you mean about "drag-and-drop management", I haven't used IE5 yet. But it sounds cool. :^))

Users might work on a samba mounted disk and then
you would have a cron job to update the pages to a webserver using sitecopy ( http://www.lyra.org/sitecopy/).
You could make a web form to allow each user to configure Sitecopy for them.

Best of luck!

Because if you write it in Python, the thing will get competitive so quickly that your company will be acquired by Microsoft. (This really happened - read this report from the 6th Python Conference.)