So who exactly would this incipient GNU Workspot project be competing with? After all, to do the public good, it should become the standard GPL solution to specific problems in a diverse, expensive and messy market.
Citrix application deployment servers, for a start.
Sun has many related products: the Sun ONE identity server. Portal server, and the application server.
And Microsoft Terminal Services.
That's just for starters. And that's many thousands worth of software, soon to have free counterparts.
***
As with most categories with open source offerings, I think ours will not really effect commercial service providers -- there are always people and corporations that want to outsource, and it's not usually because of the price of software. Webex, Placewhere, Go-To-My-PC, Hotmail, Visto, VidiTel, and most ISP's will not be effected immediately by a free package allowing you to provide services to yourself. The cost of what they offer is closely tied to service, hardware and connectivity.
Generally, corporations make money through some form of mass-production, financed by investors, amplified by armies of salespeople, deal-makers, and support people.
Well, Workspot doesn't have any of that, and isn't likely to get it. And ... do we really want it? We're impoverished, as are many of our friends, so perhaps the unattainability of creating a corporate machine makes it easier to spurn the tools that have made capitalism the world's alpha-steamroller. But, on the other hand, we've been there, lived it, and really found it terrible.
So we'll be continuing this project as a non-profit endeavor, for the benefit of the software community. And shutting the for-profit corporation. This is no guarantee of success, but at least we won't be pretending to be a commercial venture any more. We have to get real: we have no assets, and we made almost no money this year.
Is going non-profit a bad thing? No. But how did we get here?
Well, no one is investing in innovation just now ... they are investing in 'scaling'. That is, if you're already successful, and have a high 'adoption rate', and don't really need investment, then you're likely to get a call any day now from someone with financing.
Secondly, no one is publicizing small projects. Everyone has a small project -- their blog, perhaps, or neat photos they snapped with their cellphone. So the media, which is very hungry itself, is looking for 'real' stories: 'hard' news with weight and pizazz. They're not generally looking to solve computing problems or improve the world. They're trying to get noticed, so people will read their websites.
So, no publicity for Workspot. We went public with the latest incarnation of our software in January, and there was a flurry of interest. But I couldn't get on News.com, or even Slashdot.
We've had some people look at us for possible investment: Google, Intel, etc. Generally, we're too far away from what's already happening, so the examination was keen but brief.
So this blog is about to morph into a rather different kind of beast: the log of an idealist, driven to create software that is useful for people, released under a GPL license, that will offer a free alternative to commodities from Citrix, HP, Sun, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. Does the software "compete" with theirs? "Undercut" theirs? Morally, that would be wonderful -- to me, these corporations help to squeeze the life out of the world, and out of their workers. I'd be overjoyed to accelerate the end of their days. But, more likely, I'm simply empowering a group who can't afford to be their customers. I'm interested in seeing software in the hands of any individual or small group who want to try to accomplish something good, or make a living, in a variety of ways I can't possibly imagine.
It hasn't been picked up by the media, but I think this is quite a story -- VNC now has the highly touted AES encryption standard, under GNU's GPL license.
Benny Soetarman of Workspot did this work, based on Dr Brian Gladman's algorithm. The patches can be found here.
The encryption is self-contained, and lightweight, residing in the client and the server software itself. Benny explains:
"It doesn't use SSL. This is because of the Java client; it was too heavy to send the SSL classes or to have the users install an SSL implementation. The new Java 1.4 already has SSL as part of the distribution, But the majority is using MSIE, and the JVM for it is pretty old. So the current AES implementation is self contained in the applet, linux server, and native client."
Thanks to everyone who was so patient with our support delays.
Basically, Workspot isn't making enough money to pay even a single person regularly, so whether or not your questions got answered depended on the availability of our core group members.
We've recently shuffled things around a bit, to provide better response. More shuffling to come!