Dave Winer —former president of UserLand— convinced UserLand to release the Frontier kernel as open source. Manila, Radio and all web applications built upon that kernel will remain commercial software.
I really hope this will turn out to be a smart move for UserLand. I am using Frontier since 1996 and I have learned a lot from it. It is an application with such a high integration (database, server, scripting interpreter and graphical development environment in one integrated application), that for some reasons it is really a joy to develop web applications with it.
I am looking forward to see what this open source release will look like and if it is possible to integrate it with my own ideas again. There was a rich developer community alive back before Frontier went commercial that has more or less vanished from the stage. I wonder if that will come to life again.
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