Howard Stearns's post, below, about How Croquet will Take Over the Universe (Bwah-hah-hah) got me thinking about OpenLaszlo and our own plans to take over the, um, er, well, our plans for success.

Laszlo Systems, Inc, signs my paycheck, but 90% of what I do for that check is related to OpenLaszlo, the “Rich Internet Application” platform that is given away for free. Just as Howard suggests, Laszlo Systems makes its money by selling applications and services on top of the platform, not from selling the platform itself. Laszlo Mail is the first such product, and others are under development. The OpenLaszlo platform, which Laszlo Systems Inc subsidizes to the tune of several full-time developers and one full-time documentation guy, generates exactly zero dollars for the company.

Laszlo Systems, Inc, is a startup in which I have a relative pantload of stock options. So I want Laszlo Systems, Inc, to succeed, which means that Laszlo has to convince deep-pocketed customers to buy Laszlo applications. In order for Laszlo applications to be acceptable to potential customers, the customers must be convinced that the underlying technology is sound and that it will be around for the long haul. That implies that OpenLaszlo must be seen to be thriving. There must exist a rich ecology of corporations that have a financial interest in keeping OpenLaszlo healthy.

Trust is the substrate upon which the open source ecology can grow. The best way to ensure that trust, of course, it to make OpenLaszlo really, truly open; to make it abundantly clear to potential developers that Laszlo Systems is not self-dealing, not trying to control the platform for its own benefit.

Laszlo is the fourth startup I've worked at. I ain't rich yet, and I ain't getting any younger. So I want *this* to be the one we get right. Wetmachiners Howard, Gary and I all worked for, and got virtually incinerated by, Curl, which, like Laszlo and Croquet, developed a potentially web-transforming technology. Alas for us, Curl screwed the pooch, as they say; it pissed away all the opportunity that that technology could have given them (us) by messing up this fundamental process that Howard wrote about. [Read More!]

OpenLaszlo, the nifty, very nifty platform for making web applications that don't suck (and little widgets too, like the link thingy over on the right side of this page) has got a little contest going: design a T-Shirt, win an iPod. If you have any design skill at all, you should enter. Why not? (I'm talking to you, Gary.)

And whether you have design skill or not, if you write code you should check out OpenLaszlo. It's some cool stuff. And the documentation is great — lots of clear expository code, and live, running, you-can-edit-them-too code examples.

(Did I mention that I'm the OpenLaszlo doc guy?)

My fellow OpenLaszlo worker John Olmstead posts a nifty blog entry about a mysterious construction project in Palo Alto. Maybe Monty Meekman has somehow reconstituted himself and needs a safe haven?

Ray Kurzweil has has a piece in Forbes on his vision of the combination of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. According to him, we'll have AI nanobots crawling bloodstream, repairing us, and augmenting our senses. In 20 years.

Umm... yeah.

[Read More!]

Well it hurt my pride I must thay, *sniff* *sniff*, that the Martha's Vineyard Book Festival declined my 11th hour suggestion that they include me in their illustrious roster at the Gala Event which is to take place this Sunday up at the Chilmark Community Center, otherwise known as “That dusty place up at Beetlebung Corner where they have the Monday night AA meeting.”

Now, I know I'm no William Styron or David McCollough but give me a break. I'm certainly the most prominent geekoid technoparanoid miniaturist in Dukes County, and ought that not to count for something? “Maybe next year,” came the email at 12:37 this morning. Well, maybe next year to you too! That was my response as I waited for that coffee to finish perking as I read my mail this morning.

Normally I would take this kind of snub in stride but I had been kinda hoping to move a box or two of books, as I could use the grocery money not to mention that precious cubic footage in the shed where the inventory is kept.

But now let's look on the bright side of my nanoscopic writerly fame! [Read More!]