The end of March

The end of this month marks several deadlines that need to be meet.

A new project will be presented, this follows a lot of new troubles and issues that need to be dealt until the deadline expires.

We are still running short on resources. Things are certainly not going as planned and development seems to progress far slower than desired.

Nevertheless these nuisances, the progress made during the past two months is certainly something that leaves me proud to think about. We've managed to create a slim framework that combines essential components for any application to survive the upcoming decades.

We've created a Message Queue to pass messages between applications, a Process Manager to store informations about each applications, a dynamic database storage that can adopt any other technology in the future and a network component that extends the local message queue to interact with remote message queues in other instances in a fully transparent and asynchronous manner.

All of this is certainly not something to undergo with light head. A lot of effort, commitment, rewriting and brainstorming was needed until we were proud of the result.

And the result is nice. We've built a functional enterprise framework that is probably one of the smallest in the world. Using no more than a total of 2Mb and little above 10Mb of RAM while running at full speed.

Unfortunately, the deadline is indeed tight. It takes time to write test cases, to write documentation, to fine tune our code to work as intended, but things still move on.

We've been thinking about the licensing for this new framework and that is one of my biggest headaches. I want this new tool to be free and follow the traditions of all my previous works. I would also like to try out the open source way of doing things.

But several issues concern my imagination:

- If an idea is innovative, how can one prevent large corporations from creating their own "better" versions. I say this because we don't have the muscle or desire to compete against big players but they'd have a galore of fun just looking at the code and throwing all our effort into oblivion

- Open source allows branches and more often than not some wild-coder will just pick the code, create a new branch and then advertise it as better instead of contributing to a longer standing project, effectively fragmenting and eroding any community built around the tool or killing any will of the original developers to fell motivated and follow progress

These are some of the issues that our time constraints urge to solve. Personally, I prefer to look on the bright side of things and adopt an "I don't care" approach. If these are the problems that we cannot find a proper answer, then I guess that it will be better to follow with the same licensing model used with success for Winbuilder.

Completely free but closed source. On the other hand, I would really like to try out the open source for a change. I am just not ready to open my hand after so much hard work over the past 14 months to see it "used" as a commercial product by someone of ill intentions.

Time to think more about the licensing mode.