Yesterday Dave Winer announced that at some point in the next few months there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel.

It's a quite interesting news since I, just like Marc, would not be here today if it wasn't for Frontier and, of course, Dave.

When in '99 we decided that our company best development path would have been providing to our customers tools to maintain their web pages by themselves, Frontier had been a very natural choice. We developed a full CMS with Frontier, one which is still silently humming behind the scenes of hundreds of web sites, from some very small ecommerce ones to some very large corporate portals.

Also our new knowledge management product, K-collector, is currently a Frontier-based application.

Since first I heard about Dave's intention to release the Frontier kernel I have been wondering about how we could contribute to this effort. After all, having received so much, I feel we should give something back.

I don't know if we'll have time and resources to contribute to the kernel (we'd surely like to squash a few bugs which have been hunting us for all these years for the sheer pleasure of doing it). What we have is a mountain of Frontier code. From xsl-based template rendering to full blown e-commerce applications, from customer profiling to easy content editing, from directory-structured web sites to sql database integration...

Maybe we could release some parts of IdeaTools, or we could partner with UserLand to better take advantage of a stronger and more open architecture. Nobody can say what will happen, hopefully it will be fun.