To the Critical Path and Laszlo management, A few months ago we could read about the acquisition of Laszlo Systems by Critical Path. Then, a few weeks ago, the new owner of the OpenLaszlo technology put the following announcement on the OpenLaszlo.org website. "CP is committed to continued sponsorship of the OpenLaszlo Open Source project and its global community."
As a long-time supporter and committer to the OpenLaszlo project I have witnessed the deteriorating state of a once active and promising open source RIA platform in the past years. Since there have been growing doubts in the community about the willingness or ability of Laszlo to sponsor the OpenLaszlo project in such a way, that the required development work and QA is still executed, I would welcome a more detailed announcement of how Critical Path plans to sponsor the OpenLaszlo project. As a project committer I'm still willing to contribute to the project, and such community contributions can be of great value: I've just added an swf11 runtime to the LPS server, which has to go through QA and testing to be included in the 5.0 release. OpenLaszlo Flex SDK Upgrade Guide https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wdN3w9C2RQIfcw0u5R3LVs6WMiBBBPQcOo7mDqxtbJs/edit The LZPix demo application running in Flash 11.1/swf11 runtime http://www.flickr.com/photos/semanticmemories/7088852031/in/photostream/lightbox/ To me, such contributions make only sense if I have proof of the commitment of Critical Path to the OpenLaszlo platform. In the community, we have discussed forking the OpenLaszlo project under a different name, since there seems to be interest in maintaining the platform - and Laszlo has proven to not be very open to community discussions in the past 3 years. Based on my experience with the OpenLaszlo technology since early 2004, and my work on the OpenLaszlo team as a community manager as well as a project committer I have a good understanding of how much work and money went into the platform. But we have just witnessed that Adobe's decision to contribute the Adobe Flex compiler to the Apache Foundation. One of the main reasons for Adobe to contribute the SDK to the Apache Foundation was the fact, that the company never managed to get a reasonable revenue flow through the Flex technology stack to finance the SDK development. Now the Apache Flex developer mailing list has more than 700 members, and the Apache Flex SDK is on a good path to see a release of an Apache Flex SDK by the end of the year - although there are still 2-3 Adobe developers working full-time on the SDK. I believe that Laszlo has been in a similar situation since 2006/2007. Competing with Adobe, and later Microsoft Silverlight in creating a free RIA SDK or platform is a difficult business, and how are you going to make money of an RIA platform with that competition? Adobe managed to make some money through the Flex Builder/Flash Builder license sales, but the Laszlo IDE for OpenLaszlo was never released. Still, OpenLaszlo offers one of the most effective ways of building HTML5 apps, and the SWF/Flash has been long tested and is very stable. Nevertheless the platform needs better QA testing, and a 5.0 release - which would be the first major version update since March 2007. Now we are into Q2/2012, and there is still no official announcement that we are going to see a release this year. Is Critical Path / Laszlo willing to put more developers onto platform development in the future? If that is not going to happen, who is going to step in and do the needed project management, QA and development work? Maybe a non-profit foundation (or even contributing the platform to Apache) might be a solution. I would very much welcome an announcement or more detailed information on what the future of OpenLaszlo will look like, now that Laszlo is part of the Critical Path group. If Critical Path sees no value in communicating future plans of OpenLaszlo to the community, I would rather see my contributions go into an OpenLaszlo fork under a new name. Thank you, and best regards, Raju Bitter
