RE: Java

["Christopher Barber" <address@hidden>]

> Given all that you're saying, why isn't Curl (the language, not the IDEs
> etc.) open source?

Because of our business model.  We have choosen the unorthodox strategy of
billing content providers for use of deployed commercial content using our
technology, rather than charging up-front for development tools.  Also,
since we have choosen to support the client-side market, the integrity of
the runtime environment is extremely important.

We cannot afford to allow others to alter the language or the runtime
environment either to subvert our logging mechanism or to change the
language  incompatibly, making it impossible for content-providers to depend
on the same client-side environment (remember what MS did to Java?).

> last
> time I checked I couldn't use it because it doesn't run on Linux (though I
> gather that an alpha version for Linux has just been released).

Yes, you should check it out.

> It's really hard to attract developer talent to a closed source
> product, even a free one, because of this syndrome:
>
> 1) I download the free implementation of the language.
> 2) I write a lot of cool code in the language.
> 3) The company goes out of business, or gets bought by another company.
> 4) The product is shelved.
> 5) The implementation I have breaks with the next OS upgrade.
> 6) I have to re-write my code in another language.

Yes, that is indeed a barrier to acceptance in the independent developer
community.  We just have to do a good job convincing people that we are not
going to go out of business!  Frankly, you would have a lot more risk using
a commercial language from a company whose main business is something else,
because there is little downside to their dropping it.

- Christopher