We've gotten a lot of interest over the last few monts from software companies who are either already using Laszlo to build their commercial applications, or who are investigating it. Until our October open source announcement, we'd been focused mainly on consumer-facing sites who deliver services over the Web to end users. Now, we are hearing from a lot of ISVs (independent software vendors) who are looking to enhance their Web-based enterprise applications with a rich Internet application (RIA), or to migrate their client-server applications to RIAs.
A few factors make Laszlo a good fit for ISVs. The first is pure economics. Since there is no license fee associated with Laszlo Presentation Server, a software vendor can use, bundle, or deploy Laszlo to enhance their application without incurring a per-copy fee, or a fee that increases with the number of live servers. The money that might have been spent on licensing fees can be spent on things like training, support, and services with Laszlo, as well as on developing and marketing their own application.
Another factor is the particular open source license that Laszlo uses for LPS. It's the CPL (Common Public License), which is business-friendly in that it does not require that applications built on top of Laszlo are themselves open source. Had Laszlo chosen the GPL, this might be different, but we very much want to support developers of commercial applications.
Then there are the subtle distinctions between software development at software companies as compared to software development at Web companies.
First, ISVs often have migrated or partially migrated from client-server applications with rich, responsive desktop clients to Web applications with fewer features and poorer usability. A common theme we hear from ISVs interested in Laszlo is that they are trying to migrate their customers from a client-server app to a Web application, but the customers have not adopted the Web application because of its limited feature set, poor performance, or usability limitations. This is particularly important for frequent-use applications, where the user is expected to use the application for hours at a time, every day. None of this is a concern for a typical Web site, where the application being offered does not have a desktop or client-server precedent.
Another difference between ISVs and Web sites is in the type of developer they employ and the assumptions those developers bring to the table. Rarely do developers at Web companies have experience creating interactive client applications; nearly all of the developers at Web companies are server developers, and the people working on the user interface are closer to page designers than developers in terms of skills. It can be difficult to push a front-end Web team (used to building pages, not applications) to work as software engineers on interactive client software; but that is what is required when building real-world RIAs. Software developers at ISVs tend to have the perspective required to understand this; over time, we expect Web developers to arrive at the same place, but for different reasons and from a different starting point.
Posted by temkin at January 18, 2005 03:23 PM