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Sunday, July 03, 2005

Why is Sabre Supporting Rico as OpenSource?

I've been asked this question on numerous occassions. Here is my take on why it has happened.

1) Sabre Airline Solutions invested significantly in a set of standard core technology platforms built on open source technology (Java Swing, JSP/Struts, JDO, Hibernate, Spring, J2EE technologies, etc.). This rich experience with open source has created a desire among those involved to share back with the community.
2) During this investment phase a number of open-source friendly folks were hired and moved into influential positions
3) We understood that whatever innovations we had arrived at, others were probably at the same stage or would shortly be there. Why not put our stuff out and let it be a part of the early wave (for Ajax & rich internet applications) and perhaps influence how things shape up in the world. of the web Sabre has a history of innovations and so it fit with this thinking.
4) We understand that we are not really in the business of building frameworks. If we get our frameworks out to the larger community then they will only get better.
5) Those of us involved are pretty passionate folks that really get excited about innovation!
6) We have the right people at executive level that are willing to think outside the box about our how some of our software gets developed.
7) Its just great publicity.

I have been extremely pleased during my last three years at Sabre. I have had tremendous support in every endeavor I have launched. This support has been at the executive level, at the product marketing level and at the development level. I think things were just ripe for Sabre to do something like this.

Anyway that's my view on it.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

you are making a contribution. props.
i didnt even mention OSS angles in this:
http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/000813.html

Anonymous said...

It looks amazing. That said, I hope that you work with the Dojo folks. You're focussed on behaviors while they seem to be focussed on the lower-level event handling and the like. Put together, this would be the perfect AJAX framework.

Bill Scott said...

Thanks.

Actually Darren & I met the Alex (author of Dojo) at the Ajax Summit. We had some very fun discussions. You are right our is complementary concerning where we are focused.

We talked about the synergy between the two toolkits. I think both teams are open to this. There are a few differences in our approach to the HTML markup that I am not real sure how to resolve consistently. But Alex has done a very good job on the low-level (plumbing as he calls it).

I have also been in conversations with Thomas Fuchs, the script.aculo.us author. Our toolkits are very similar. He has focused on effects and recently added some nice drag and drop functionality.

I agree with you that really the community is best served if we in the opensource community can work cooperatively.

Thanks. I will follow up with Alex.

Anonymous said...

http://openrico.org/behaviorFeatures.page

I'm sure it was accidental, and doesn't really matter, but I thought I'd give u the heads-up that there are three &;t;div>s with the same id="" in the example on that page!

Bill Scott said...

Alan,

Thanks, I am a stickler for details so I appreciate the heads up. Too much rush and too much copy & paste created that :-)