So here we are: as announced Frontier's kernel is now open source, under a GPL.

I have listened to Dave's Morning Coffee Notes about the release and I'm still trying to figure out what this will mean for us as a company.

At evectors we have been working with Frontier for the last 6 years. Our content management system, IdeaTools, is based on Frontier and we have used to power hundreds of web sites of all sizes. K-Collector also runs on Frontier.

Frontier is a quite unique piece of software, it has some problems but also several advantages.

And now what?

We will keep paying fees to UserLand for all IdeaTools or K-Collector licenses that we will manage to sell. Technically even if our products have nothing to do with Manila there are some parts of the code which are not distributed with the open source version (for example the mainResponder). But most of all Frontier is very reasonably priced and anyway for several reasons I think that paying UserLand is the right thing to do.

Now that we have access to the source code we might decide to kernelize some parts of IdeaTools. It would probably improve significantly the performance allowing us to optimize some parts of the application. But to do so Simone would have to remember his C and start working on a different development environment, most probably not an easy nor a quick task.

And since these would be very targeted developments, most probably it would not make sense to include them in the main distribution of Frontier leading very quickly to a fork.

But learning how to work on Frontier's kernel might also allow us, at some point, to fix one or two bugs or maybe improve some parts of the application. We invented all kinds of tricks in these years, I'm sure that we could contribute significantly. Of course, an open source Frontier would also mean that some other developers might improve it and consequently help us.

I'm also wondering about how this news would impact our sales process. Being dependent on another company's technology has (quite rarely to be honest) been an issue with a few customers. Starting today, regardless of what will happen to UserLand, Frontier has the potential to live forever, and this might make somebody more comfortable.

Update: MainResponder will be relased. Manila.root, of course, will not. Apparently many other very useful Frontier technologies will also be relased under GPL.