Open sourcing QuickTime would not affect Apple greatly. For the most part, QuickTime is free. The Pro version they charge for, but it's irrelevant to most people (those who just want to view QuickTime media).
What would Apple gain from open sourcing QuickTime? Not much. QuickTime is simply libraries that allow for time based media. There are little to no bugs in the QuickTime libraries. It's remarkably robust. QuickTime apps, on the other hand, might benefit from open sourcing, but for the most part are controlled by Other Companies.
The good part about QuickTime is the ability to plug in new codecs. Like Sorenson. Sorenson is a for-profit company, who's revenue depends on the Sorenson codec. They will not open source their codec, at least not until they've replaced it with something better. However, it is in their favor to freely distribute the codec so that people can view their codec-compressed files. So Sorenson can release the codec for Linux.
Some character stated how simple it is to make your own codec. I seriously doubt it. Compression is hard -- good compression of images is harder yet. Sorenson spent many, many man-hours developing their codec. Think you can do better? I guarantee its more than separating the signal into luminance and chromiance and run-length encoding it. You have to consider speed of decompression (this is why a lot of media is still distributed in Cinepak -- a low end 486 can decompress it real-time), perceptual anomalies (some people can see the compression in DirecTV broadcasts, some can't), recoverability (do you pause playback when your pipe is congested, vis a vis Real, or drop frame rate, or use a more robust caching mechanism so congestion is reduced as a failure point).
In addition, I think Apple isn't terribly interested in the Unix market right now partially because X sucks. There's no gamma control, no consistancy, and not so nice to look at. Windows is the same, but the marketshare of Windows makes for a powerful argument to ignore such problems. Linux users? We're left out in the cold, cause who cares about us?
QuickTime is Apple's baby. It will be released for MacOSX, which is BSD. It will come over to our side. You want to make it come quicker? Show some support for Apple's efforts, and help with the Darwin effort, or the QuickTime Streaming Server. You can't expect a big corporation to just give, give, give, just because it's right. Show them the advantage of open source by helping, rather than sniping from the sidelines.
Should programmers even be allowed to write documentation?
Should documentation be customizable to specific users, or should it be more general to explain the underlying philosophy of a program?
Explaination of questions:
Programmers are rarely good documentation writers. At least, that's the common wisdom. More importantly (I think), programmers should not spend the creative energy on documentation, and let somebody who isn't such a good programmer but is a master wordsmith fill in those cracks. But I'd be interested in your opinion on the matter.
I can think of how a documentation system could be combined with a relational-DB to provide a single-source document that is specific to a person's installation. So, a user who installs KDE (but not GNOME) would never even have the information on how to set up a modem with GNOME. This would provide nice step-by-steps, but would not teach the underlying technology of negotiating with a remote host, interfacing with a serial device, etc. Which is better? A deeper understanding or end results?
Unix's future depends entirely on its flexibility -- the ability of its core functionality to adapt to the changing face of computing and computers. If Unix becomes irrevocably tied to a specific type of hardware, or a specific type of low-level interface (i.e. libraries, protocol stacks, APIs), then it loses its ability to flow with the river of change.
An example would be Microsoft. At first, MS ignored the Internet, thinking that it was not all that interesting enough to devote resources away from projects like Microsoft Bob. Oops, the Internet turned out to be a VERY big thing, and MS was forced to devote massive resources in catch-up mode. Luckily for MS, they had those massive resources, or the MS today might look remarkably similar to the Amiga of 1996 or so -- desperately hanging on to the "glory days" like a 1960s era hippie still wearing tie-dyed tshirts.
Will Unix be replaced? Not likely, but I say that not from any particular conviction that the Way of Unix is better or a Holy Jihad Against All Things Not GPLed. I tend to think of Unix as a big box o' tools, and as such are more flexible than one big tool that does everything. It's the difference between a workshop and a factory. Given enough tools, a workshop can do anything. A factory, on the other hand, can do what it was designed for very, very well, but needs to be retooled if that thing it does changes. Retooling is expensive, complicated, and fraught with errors. Conversely, if your phillips head screwdriver won't screw those new star head screws, you just go buy a star head driver, and continue on your merry way.
Will Unix change? Almost certainly! A heirarchal filesystem is great for a machine, but normal people (i.e. non-nerds) don't neccessarily think in those terms. They may think in terms of jobs, projects, letters, scans, or big-busted redheads in latex. Arbitrary grouping of data (I think) will be the next Big Thing in user-computer interfaces. Since Unix likes heirarchal file systems, there may be a tool that communicates between the user and OS (like a relational database) grafted onto Unix. Similarly, the distiction between the OS and an application will become blurred -- since most people don't care to differentiate, why should we make them?
Will something else that does the above replace Unix? Not likely. Mostly because the free Unixen available now, and free (speech) software available for it, gives a paradigm-seeking person the ability to start halfway up the ladder. As far as I know, Moore's Law hasn't been revoked yet, and system speed will continue to move innovation away from hardware to software, and as such allow Unixen to graft such additions on without a significant performance hit.
But will it still be called Unix? No. I can say that with conviction, because I have never used Unix. I've used Linux, Open/Net/Free BSD, not Unix. The Great End-User Operating Environment will probably be called SuperHyper Infobahn Facilitating New and Improved Bitchin' Cool Thing, or some other nom de plume that isn't as scary sounding as "Unix". But it will probably be based on Unix, nonetheless. At least, that's my worthless opinion.
First, thanks for your hard work. Slackware was my first distro, back at the 1.2.8 kernel. It ran on a discarded 386 for quite a while as I was learning Unix-like OSes.
These days, I'm a bit more cosmopolitan, and run Mandrake, RedHat, and OpenBSD. I haven't run Slackware in quite some time. Mostly for the package management of other flavors (RPMs and the FreeBSD ports tree that OpenBSD has adopted), but also partially for appearance of greater innovation -- whether real or imagined.
Every distro and flavor seems to have it's own "hook": security, OpenBSD; end-user friendlyness, RedHat; nerd-factor, Debian. Slackware can be all of those things, but I can't really identify what Slackware's "hook" is.
As a derivitive question, do you think you would increase Slack's appeal if it did find a "hook" or a niche and filled it faster and better than the other distro, and what would you like for that "hook" to be?
My vote would be for Slack to become the graphic professional's distro of choice. (of course, I'm very, very biased, as that is what I do) If there was gamma control in X, better, cleaner, easier font integration and support (Postscript only, please!), and color matching APIs, Slack could give OSX a run for it's money.
The biggest threat to a small business's success is under-capitalization. That means you need cash, and you need plenty of it.
Your first line of investment needs to come from friends, family, ex-lovers, and your dog groomer's rich, eccentric uncle. Don't touch VCs until that money looks to be running out. VCs will want a part of your company, and they will get it, or you'll get no money.
You will give part of your business away eventually, but don't start giving it away too soon. Keep control as long as you can.
Be intellectually honest with yourself. If your product does X, make sure it does X to the best of it's ability, and in a way that solves your target audience's problems fully. Sounds dumb, but it's an important distiction. For example, Excel is a pretty good spreadsheet, and can be used by almost everybody -- but NOT before they take a 3 month class, or read a mind-numbingly dull "How to be an unleashed Excel dummy in 21 days" book.
Keep in mind that your audience is not you. They aren't hackers. Unless your product is hacker-oriented, of course. Get somebody who can do interaction design to make sure that your users aren't lost or overwhelmed.
Above all, have fun and learn something. Do a little cross-training. If you're design, learn some coding. If you're a coder, learn some design. Don't get pigeon-holed into a single task. Because, most likely (according to statistics), you'll go down in flames. If you take that time to learn new things, it makes you're company stronger, less likely to implode under internal pressures, and makes you more hirable if it does go splat.
This is more a concept than an answer, but my thinking on search engines and their ilk is that they are becoming (if not already are) useless. 800 million web sites? Two billion? Twelve trillion? How far will it go? Who knows? We could eat up every MIP of processing and every bit of bandwidth trying to keep current in search engine indexing... and in the end, you'll have a mess.
The answer? I don't know, but I have an idea. Berners-Lee talked in his book about a "web of trust" -- mostly talking about security and e-commerce and such -- but the concept can be expanded to apply here.
For example, I trust/. to provide me with useful, timely information, and act as a great resource for all things nerdly. If/. provided a search engine for a few specific sites that the/. content owners felt were worthy of inclusion, I'd use it quite a bit./. becomes responsible for maintaining those connections, and monitoring the output to ensure relevancy. The outside content owners provide hooks into their data, tailored to the idiosyncracies of the/. community (plenty of RMS, no MSG).
Censorship? Depends on your definition. If you trust/. to provide good info, you also trust (implicitly, if not overtly) their editorial judgements. It's a human-to-human connection, facilitated, not replaced, by the computer.
I liken it to a bibliography. When I do dead-trees library research, I like to find the appropriate section, pull a book down and skim it. If it looks appropriate, I'll then check the bibliography to see what other books the authors found appropriate. Hey, they've just done research for me! Neat! Go to those books, the books under those, etc. I now have a web of sources, all culled from a (basically) random book pulled from the shelves.
Expanding that to the Web,/. trusts theOnion to provide the latest in useful headlines around the world (I know I do...). The Onion provides, through a "Bibliomatic" link (TM, (c) me me me me... are you reading this Amazon?:), hooks into their data with published calls to pull appropriate, timely keywords relating to their content, with the ability to search archived content as well.
Everything goes swimmingly, until The Onion IPOs and starts to be run by MBAs, and the content-o-meter drops to zero. Mr. Taco gets innundated with a million emails complaining about how the/. results for The Onion all return "Make $$$ Fast with 18 year old transvestites having anal sex with dogs". Taco dumps all calls to The Onion's content, fires off a letter threatening Armageddon, informs them that they are off the list, and starts using somebody else.
Some things we got right the first time around. Car doors that open forward (not up), radios with volume dials (not tiny, fiddly buttons) with a real potentiometer behind them, and bibliographies. Those search engines that don't incorporate at least some aspects of this become obsolete, or relegated to searching for obscure content.
What about mailing list archives? Those are GREAT resources -- better than the FAQ usually. Getting to that data is more problematic, but not impossible. You can index the subject lines and provide a hook to that -- if/. chooses to use that hook, great. You can index the whole mess and force content owners to search it -- which will put you on the blacklist pretty quickly when people get a jillion results that all have "Im hafing problems wif Winblows" as their title. Or you can send a link with each possibly appropriate query to your own search engine that will locally search the mess.
I think the One True Search Engine is a pipe dream. As for myself, I try Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista in that order. Most of the time, I'm looking for someplace I've already been, and can't remember the URL, so I can customize my query to bring that particular site up in the rankings. I've tried doing pure general searches, but I'm always daunted by "Your querey returned 12,486 results." Yeah, right.
For more on-topic information, try Philip's book. He had the same problem as discussed here, and he solved it with a few lines of TCL code inside AOLserver. That's the short answer...
FWIW, a sort-of prepackaged solution could be to go with Philip Greenspun's ACS, with an Oracle and AOLserver substrate.
I've got the ACS, AOLserver, and Oracle 8.0.5 running on a Thinkpad (P133) with 48mb RAM/2gig HDD, and it's usable for development. It would only host, probably, 10 users before it became too sluggish for end users, but we're talking a crummy P133 Thinkpad here...
The Upside: robust, ongoing development (see Philip's photo.net) from MIT educated brains. Any development of modules you might do can be used by other ACS users, and you get the "many eyes, shallow bugs" effect.
Also, the ADP programming model is very similar to PHP.
The Downside: you're pretty much restricted to Oracle and Tcl. Some people like Tcl, some don't. Oracle, in a production environment, really needs a 6-figure DBA.
It's worth looking at -- you can extend the toolkit to suit your needs, or if you have $$$, you can hire ArsDigita to do it for you and support you.
Do you think that the Bazaar model of software development will be taught as an economic model in a more traditional educational setting (i.e. the modern university)? As an ancillary question, would you be interested in participating in the authoring of the material neccessary to include the Open Source economic model in a textbook, or would you leave it to "suits"?
My personal opinion: the free-wheeling nature of community development is such that codifying it into a dead-trees book would be an excercise in futility. Not only is the development evolving, but the model of development is evolving as well, making the theories and concepts nearly moot by the time they reach the press.
Also, I wouldn't want ESR wasting his time, that could be spent teaching and coding, on sitting in on editorial meetings educating publishers.
Let's take a brief look at history. Apple was the first gaussian wave. Most people were ignorant about computers, so the simple one piece box was very successful.
Lemme tell you a tale...
I've got a computer at home that I run a windowing system, write/edit HTML and Tcl, surf the web, check email, Telnet, do word-processing, and even some page-layout. Expensive workstation?
Nope, my plain old SE/30, circa 1989. Runs with 8 megs of RAM, 80 meg hard drive, System 7.1, and has a 10baseT ethernet card. Motorola 68030 processor at 33 mhz, with an FPU (3.9 MIPS). You'd be hard pressed to put together a 386/33 8/80 running Linux with X, much less a 386 that wouldn't unbalance your desk. Faugh!
People bought Macs (the SE/30 in 1989 sold for $4,400) because you couldn't get anything like it ANYWHERE. Totally unique. And that sumbitch is still running. Boots in 25 seconds, too.
If that isn't impressive enough, lemme tell you about my SE (circa 1987, 68000, no FPU, 4 meg RAM, 20 meg HD, Ethernet, sold in '87 w/HD for $3,700) that runs a windowing system, can word-process, edit HTML/Tcl, Telnet, check email, even surf the web (with MacWeb or Lynx).
Bah, you get Linux and X running on a PC/XT (or even AT -- I'm feeling charitable) in 4 megs of RAM, then we can talk.
Depending on how you define "workstation", I can see how NT is beating Unix. Architects and engineers use "workstations" -- defined as bigger, badder, faster than your standard box -- and they overwhelmingly use AutoCAD, which is Win32 only. There are a *lot* of architects, engineers, contractors, specifiers, etc. out there.
Kinda sad that there isn't an AEC package for Linux (yet). It would do gangbuster business. An ironclad Unix app beats a fru-fru, half-assed 95/98/NT app any day.
An open source drafting program that incorporates the OpenDWG movement would reverse this NT "workstation" trend, IMHO.
Even better, if the CAD package would read and understand the current AutoLISP tools that people have spent so much time and money on, with the stability and power advantage of Unix, AutoCAD would have very little to stand on.
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Open sourcing QuickTime would not affect Apple greatly. For the most part, QuickTime is free. The Pro version they charge for, but it's irrelevant to most people (those who just want to view QuickTime media).
What would Apple gain from open sourcing QuickTime? Not much. QuickTime is simply libraries that allow for time based media. There are little to no bugs in the QuickTime libraries. It's remarkably robust. QuickTime apps, on the other hand, might benefit from open sourcing, but for the most part are controlled by Other Companies.
The good part about QuickTime is the ability to plug in new codecs. Like Sorenson. Sorenson is a for-profit company, who's revenue depends on the Sorenson codec. They will not open source their codec, at least not until they've replaced it with something better. However, it is in their favor to freely distribute the codec so that people can view their codec-compressed files. So Sorenson can release the codec for Linux.
Some character stated how simple it is to make your own codec. I seriously doubt it. Compression is hard -- good compression of images is harder yet. Sorenson spent many, many man-hours developing their codec. Think you can do better? I guarantee its more than separating the signal into luminance and chromiance and run-length encoding it. You have to consider speed of decompression (this is why a lot of media is still distributed in Cinepak -- a low end 486 can decompress it real-time), perceptual anomalies (some people can see the compression in DirecTV broadcasts, some can't), recoverability (do you pause playback when your pipe is congested, vis a vis Real, or drop frame rate, or use a more robust caching mechanism so congestion is reduced as a failure point).
In addition, I think Apple isn't terribly interested in the Unix market right now partially because X sucks. There's no gamma control, no consistancy, and not so nice to look at. Windows is the same, but the marketshare of Windows makes for a powerful argument to ignore such problems. Linux users? We're left out in the cold, cause who cares about us?
QuickTime is Apple's baby. It will be released for MacOSX, which is BSD. It will come over to our side. You want to make it come quicker? Show some support for Apple's efforts, and help with the Darwin effort, or the QuickTime Streaming Server. You can't expect a big corporation to just give, give, give, just because it's right. Show them the advantage of open source by helping, rather than sniping from the sidelines.
Questions first:
Should programmers even be allowed to write documentation?
Should documentation be customizable to specific users, or should it be more general to explain the underlying philosophy of a program?
Explaination of questions:
Programmers are rarely good documentation writers. At least, that's the common wisdom. More importantly (I think), programmers should not spend the creative energy on documentation, and let somebody who isn't such a good programmer but is a master wordsmith fill in those cracks. But I'd be interested in your opinion on the matter.
I can think of how a documentation system could be combined with a relational-DB to provide a single-source document that is specific to a person's installation. So, a user who installs KDE (but not GNOME) would never even have the information on how to set up a modem with GNOME. This would provide nice step-by-steps, but would not teach the underlying technology of negotiating with a remote host, interfacing with a serial device, etc. Which is better? A deeper understanding or end results?
Unix's future depends entirely on its flexibility -- the ability of its core functionality to adapt to the changing face of computing and computers. If Unix becomes irrevocably tied to a specific type of hardware, or a specific type of low-level interface (i.e. libraries, protocol stacks, APIs), then it loses its ability to flow with the river of change.
An example would be Microsoft. At first, MS ignored the Internet, thinking that it was not all that interesting enough to devote resources away from projects like Microsoft Bob. Oops, the Internet turned out to be a VERY big thing, and MS was forced to devote massive resources in catch-up mode. Luckily for MS, they had those massive resources, or the MS today might look remarkably similar to the Amiga of 1996 or so -- desperately hanging on to the "glory days" like a 1960s era hippie still wearing tie-dyed tshirts.
Will Unix be replaced? Not likely, but I say that not from any particular conviction that the Way of Unix is better or a Holy Jihad Against All Things Not GPLed. I tend to think of Unix as a big box o' tools, and as such are more flexible than one big tool that does everything. It's the difference between a workshop and a factory. Given enough tools, a workshop can do anything. A factory, on the other hand, can do what it was designed for very, very well, but needs to be retooled if that thing it does changes. Retooling is expensive, complicated, and fraught with errors. Conversely, if your phillips head screwdriver won't screw those new star head screws, you just go buy a star head driver, and continue on your merry way.
Will Unix change? Almost certainly! A heirarchal filesystem is great for a machine, but normal people (i.e. non-nerds) don't neccessarily think in those terms. They may think in terms of jobs, projects, letters, scans, or big-busted redheads in latex. Arbitrary grouping of data (I think) will be the next Big Thing in user-computer interfaces. Since Unix likes heirarchal file systems, there may be a tool that communicates between the user and OS (like a relational database) grafted onto Unix. Similarly, the distiction between the OS and an application will become blurred -- since most people don't care to differentiate, why should we make them?
Will something else that does the above replace Unix? Not likely. Mostly because the free Unixen available now, and free (speech) software available for it, gives a paradigm-seeking person the ability to start halfway up the ladder. As far as I know, Moore's Law hasn't been revoked yet, and system speed will continue to move innovation away from hardware to software, and as such allow Unixen to graft such additions on without a significant performance hit.
But will it still be called Unix? No. I can say that with conviction, because I have never used Unix. I've used Linux, Open/Net/Free BSD, not Unix. The Great End-User Operating Environment will probably be called SuperHyper Infobahn Facilitating New and Improved Bitchin' Cool Thing, or some other nom de plume that isn't as scary sounding as "Unix". But it will probably be based on Unix, nonetheless. At least, that's my worthless opinion.
First, thanks for your hard work. Slackware was my first distro, back at the 1.2.8 kernel. It ran on a discarded 386 for quite a while as I was learning Unix-like OSes.
These days, I'm a bit more cosmopolitan, and run Mandrake, RedHat, and OpenBSD. I haven't run Slackware in quite some time. Mostly for the package management of other flavors (RPMs and the FreeBSD ports tree that OpenBSD has adopted), but also partially for appearance of greater innovation -- whether real or imagined.
Every distro and flavor seems to have it's own "hook": security, OpenBSD; end-user friendlyness, RedHat; nerd-factor, Debian. Slackware can be all of those things, but I can't really identify what Slackware's "hook" is.
As a derivitive question, do you think you would increase Slack's appeal if it did find a "hook" or a niche and filled it faster and better than the other distro, and what would you like for that "hook" to be?
My vote would be for Slack to become the graphic professional's distro of choice. (of course, I'm very, very biased, as that is what I do) If there was gamma control in X, better, cleaner, easier font integration and support (Postscript only, please!), and color matching APIs, Slack could give OSX a run for it's money.
The biggest threat to a small business's success is under-capitalization. That means you need cash, and you need plenty of it.
Your first line of investment needs to come from friends, family, ex-lovers, and your dog groomer's rich, eccentric uncle. Don't touch VCs until that money looks to be running out. VCs will want a part of your company, and they will get it, or you'll get no money.
You will give part of your business away eventually, but don't start giving it away too soon. Keep control as long as you can.
Be intellectually honest with yourself. If your product does X, make sure it does X to the best of it's ability, and in a way that solves your target audience's problems fully. Sounds dumb, but it's an important distiction. For example, Excel is a pretty good spreadsheet, and can be used by almost everybody -- but NOT before they take a 3 month class, or read a mind-numbingly dull "How to be an unleashed Excel dummy in 21 days" book.
Keep in mind that your audience is not you. They aren't hackers. Unless your product is hacker-oriented, of course. Get somebody who can do interaction design to make sure that your users aren't lost or overwhelmed.
Above all, have fun and learn something. Do a little cross-training. If you're design, learn some coding. If you're a coder, learn some design. Don't get pigeon-holed into a single task. Because, most likely (according to statistics), you'll go down in flames. If you take that time to learn new things, it makes you're company stronger, less likely to implode under internal pressures, and makes you more hirable if it does go splat.
This is more a concept than an answer, but my thinking on search engines and their ilk is that they are becoming (if not already are) useless. 800 million web sites? Two billion? Twelve trillion? How far will it go? Who knows? We could eat up every MIP of processing and every bit of bandwidth trying to keep current in search engine indexing... and in the end, you'll have a mess.
The answer? I don't know, but I have an idea. Berners-Lee talked in his book about a "web of trust" -- mostly talking about security and e-commerce and such -- but the concept can be expanded to apply here.
For example, I trust /. to provide me with useful, timely information, and act as a great resource for all things nerdly. If /. provided a search engine for a few specific sites that the /. content owners felt were worthy of inclusion, I'd use it quite a bit. /. becomes responsible for maintaining those connections, and monitoring the output to ensure relevancy. The outside content owners provide hooks into their data, tailored to the idiosyncracies of the /. community (plenty of RMS, no MSG).
Censorship? Depends on your definition. If you trust /. to provide good info, you also trust (implicitly, if not overtly) their editorial judgements. It's a human-to-human connection, facilitated, not replaced, by the computer.
I liken it to a bibliography. When I do dead-trees library research, I like to find the appropriate section, pull a book down and skim it. If it looks appropriate, I'll then check the bibliography to see what other books the authors found appropriate. Hey, they've just done research for me! Neat! Go to those books, the books under those, etc. I now have a web of sources, all culled from a (basically) random book pulled from the shelves.
Expanding that to the Web, /. trusts theOnion to provide the latest in useful headlines around the world (I know I do...). The Onion provides, through a "Bibliomatic" link (TM, (c) me me me me ... are you reading this Amazon? :), hooks into their data with published calls to pull appropriate, timely keywords relating to their content, with the ability to search archived content as well.
Everything goes swimmingly, until The Onion IPOs and starts to be run by MBAs, and the content-o-meter drops to zero. Mr. Taco gets innundated with a million emails complaining about how the /. results for The Onion all return "Make $$$ Fast with 18 year old transvestites having anal sex with dogs". Taco dumps all calls to The Onion's content, fires off a letter threatening Armageddon, informs them that they are off the list, and starts using somebody else.
Some things we got right the first time around. Car doors that open forward (not up), radios with volume dials (not tiny, fiddly buttons) with a real potentiometer behind them, and bibliographies. Those search engines that don't incorporate at least some aspects of this become obsolete, or relegated to searching for obscure content.
What about mailing list archives? Those are GREAT resources -- better than the FAQ usually. Getting to that data is more problematic, but not impossible. You can index the subject lines and provide a hook to that -- if /. chooses to use that hook, great. You can index the whole mess and force content owners to search it -- which will put you on the blacklist pretty quickly when people get a jillion results that all have "Im hafing problems wif Winblows" as their title. Or you can send a link with each possibly appropriate query to your own search engine that will locally search the mess.
I think the One True Search Engine is a pipe dream. As for myself, I try Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista in that order. Most of the time, I'm looking for someplace I've already been, and can't remember the URL, so I can customize my query to bring that particular site up in the rankings. I've tried doing pure general searches, but I'm always daunted by "Your querey returned 12,486 results." Yeah, right.
For more on-topic information, try Philip's book. He had the same problem as discussed here, and he solved it with a few lines of TCL code inside AOLserver. That's the short answer...
FWIW, a sort-of prepackaged solution could be to go with Philip Greenspun's ACS, with an Oracle and AOLserver substrate.
I've got the ACS, AOLserver, and Oracle 8.0.5 running on a Thinkpad (P133) with 48mb RAM/2gig HDD, and it's usable for development. It would only host, probably, 10 users before it became too sluggish for end users, but we're talking a crummy P133 Thinkpad here...
The Upside: robust, ongoing development (see Philip's photo.net) from MIT educated brains. Any development of modules you might do can be used by other ACS users, and you get the "many eyes, shallow bugs" effect.
Also, the ADP programming model is very similar to PHP.
The Downside: you're pretty much restricted to Oracle and Tcl. Some people like Tcl, some don't. Oracle, in a production environment, really needs a 6-figure DBA.
It's worth looking at -- you can extend the toolkit to suit your needs, or if you have $$$, you can hire ArsDigita to do it for you and support you.
Do you think that the Bazaar model of software development will be taught as an economic model in a more traditional educational setting (i.e. the modern university)? As an ancillary question, would you be interested in participating in the authoring of the material neccessary to include the Open Source economic model in a textbook, or would you leave it to "suits"?
My personal opinion: the free-wheeling nature of community development is such that codifying it into a dead-trees book would be an excercise in futility. Not only is the development evolving, but the model of development is evolving as well, making the theories and concepts nearly moot by the time they reach the press.
Also, I wouldn't want ESR wasting his time, that could be spent teaching and coding, on sitting in on editorial meetings educating publishers.
Lemme tell you a tale...
I've got a computer at home that I run a windowing system, write/edit HTML and Tcl, surf the web, check email, Telnet, do word-processing, and even some page-layout. Expensive workstation?
Nope, my plain old SE/30, circa 1989. Runs with 8 megs of RAM, 80 meg hard drive, System 7.1, and has a 10baseT ethernet card. Motorola 68030 processor at 33 mhz, with an FPU (3.9 MIPS). You'd be hard pressed to put together a 386/33 8/80 running Linux with X, much less a 386 that wouldn't unbalance your desk. Faugh!
People bought Macs (the SE/30 in 1989 sold for $4,400) because you couldn't get anything like it ANYWHERE. Totally unique. And that sumbitch is still running. Boots in 25 seconds, too.
If that isn't impressive enough, lemme tell you about my SE (circa 1987, 68000, no FPU, 4 meg RAM, 20 meg HD, Ethernet, sold in '87 w/HD for $3,700) that runs a windowing system, can word-process, edit HTML/Tcl, Telnet, check email, even surf the web (with MacWeb or Lynx).
Bah, you get Linux and X running on a PC/XT (or even AT -- I'm feeling charitable) in 4 megs of RAM, then we can talk.
Depending on how you define "workstation", I can see how NT is beating Unix. Architects and engineers use "workstations" -- defined as bigger, badder, faster than your standard box -- and they overwhelmingly use AutoCAD, which is Win32 only. There are a *lot* of architects, engineers, contractors, specifiers, etc. out there.
Kinda sad that there isn't an AEC package for Linux (yet). It would do gangbuster business. An ironclad Unix app beats a fru-fru, half-assed 95/98/NT app any day.
An open source drafting program that incorporates the OpenDWG movement would reverse this NT "workstation" trend, IMHO.
Even better, if the CAD package would read and understand the current AutoLISP tools that people have spent so much time and money on, with the stability and power advantage of Unix, AutoCAD would have very little to stand on.
Just my opinion....