Re: OT - Curl & patents

[Christopher Barber <address@hidden>]

Jeffrey Siegal <jbs@quiotix.com> writes:

> but I will say that comparing yourself with Sun or Microsoft is unrealistic
> to the point of perhaps being delusional.

That's kind of harsh.  I compare us to them as well as Macromedia and Apple
because they all produce commercial programming languages and software
development tools, not because of size.

> From what I've seen here, and a bit elsewhere, I find Curl's approach both
> out of the mainstream and inappropriate for a startup.

Fair enough, but can you be more specific?  What should we do differently?

> And there is likely to be a much larger subset of people who have reasoned
> concerns about *over*-commercialization and are wary of making personal,
> commercial, or financial investments in a platform that is too tightly locked
> up by a single vendor.  People might have been more likely to fall into that
> trap in past decades, but today the costs of having critical infrastructure
> held as proprietary IP are too well understood.

Yes, these are definitely perceptions that we have to overcome, but we feel
that for a client-side language to succeed, it's integrity must be sustained.
If there are many different incompatible versions, then no one will be able to
assume that their applications will work everywhere.  As long as we are the
only vendor for our plug-in, we can assure our users that their content will
work as expected.  A strictly enforced standard would be another approach to
this problem, but I cannot think of any examples of this working very well in
the domain of programming languages.

> There has been *major* resistance to both Sun's and Microsoft's attempts to
> "own the Internet", though perhaps their *relative* success compared to yours
> has blinded you to that fact.

We are not at all blind to the fact that we are a very small company with
limited resources.  Microsoft and Sun can spend more money promoting their
software than we can spend just developing ours.  On the other hand, we only
need a small fraction of their revenues to be successful.

> Unfortunately, it is precisely the early adopters, on whom your entire 
> success depends, who are going to be mostput off by what may be perceived 
> to be a lawyer-centric corporate culture and strategy.

We really don't have a "lawyer-centric" corporate culture, although I could
see how you might think so just looking at the legal stuff on our website.  In
reality our culture has really been very "engineer-centric".  Perhaps one
problem is that our web-site has not been designed to address the perspectives
of engineers.

> I always thought that the move to commercialize Curl was extremely 
> premature, from the point of view of the success of the platform.

I hope you are wrong, but I am sure that if it had not been commercialized it
would not have become as useful as it is today.  

We are really not trying to dominate the internet or become a corporate bully.
We are just trying to make an honest dollar selling a useful product.

- Christopher