[FRIAM] Seaside (Smalltalk web development framework)

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Joshua Thorp wrote:
> If you are a multi-billion dollar company why interoperate?  Just 
> declare the rest of the market for suckers and dilettantes.  
> Unfortunately for billion dollar companies its turtles all the way 
> down and they struggle mightily just to interoperate with their own 
> products--and largely fail. 
Because you definitely risk not staying a multi-billion dollar software 
company if you do that.
Microsoft, for example, has not actually done that.  For example, it's 
easy to make SOAP web services with Visual Studio.  They were also early 
to put XML support into not only their middleware but also primary 
applications.  .NET cross-language support is really pretty impressive.  
To match Java, they aligned all of their language support (significantly 
including C++ and Visual Basic) on one publicly documented virtual 
machine platform while also making a good competitor to Java in the 
process, C#.   Further, they made them all interoperable with the same 
libraries, both for fast within-box legacy calls (COM) and cross box 
(SOAP).   Sun might have liked to lock people in to `pure Java', but now 
they've also been forced to innovate in Java itself and the runtime. 

I think Linux and free software definitely made these companies be 
better than they would have been otherwise.  A strong commons helps to 
make them somewhat honest.  In 1990 it was barely possible to get work 
done on entirely free systems.  Tremendous progress has been made since 
then.