Thread

Forgive me, but I’ve been listening to too many podcasts (tech related) lately and it got me thinking….....

What would happen if, for instance, EE or a successor stopped being developed and/or sold in 10 years? Take a strange “what if” for instance if all the main developers became multi-millionaires and sold out to MS, or they all went down in a plane disaster (G_d forbid)....

Don’t mean to be morbid, but I am wondering if this has ever been discussed here? Having been a webmaster since 1995, I’ve seen stranger and more far-out things happen.

Certainly the same would apply for ANY software, and even more for certain proprietary packages.

That would be lame, indeed, but not altogether catastrophic—such happens all the time.  When b2/cafelog stopped active development, a lot of folks were heartbroken, but Photomatt picked it up and now the world has Wordpress.

In your scenario, it would create a vacuum, to be sure, but someone—probably a lot of someones—would step in to fill.  As it is, with a little imagination and really not that much effort, you could roll your own EE from CodeIgniter right now, if you wanted, the latter being so good.  So rest easy…

Hmmm I am not sure I can even count the number of software and hardware products that have come and gone in the past 2 to 4 years much less 10 years. 

I am even talking about products costing $100’s of thousands of dollars that were dropped because of one company purchasing another and deciding a specific product line was just not what they were after, instead they bought out the company for a different product at the same company.  Likely not many here have heard of Spectra, but it was a enterprise grade add on to ColdFusion the development language.  Macromedia bought Allaire out.  They wanted to roll ColdFusion into to their product line, integrate it into their web development tools, their multimedia languages, etc.  Spectra did not fit the bill and they killed it very shortly after the Allaire purchase.  I know of a few enterprises that hated Macromedia so much that they actually even took the steps to move away from ColdFusion as well just for spite. 

I don’t know about the others around here but I don’t picture going away any time soon 😉

EE is built completely on open source technologies with no encryption. Should the unthinkable happen I’m sure some enterprising people would carry the torch. While I won’t disclose specifics I can say that EllisLab has a plan should some unthinkable tragedy befall all of us at once.

As to selling out to Microsoft… over my dead body.

EllisLab has a plan should some unthinkable tragedy befall all of us at once.

As to selling out to Microsoft… over my dead body.

Uh…

I forgot all about Spectra!! I do remember it. By the way, it’s still available on the internet (http://spectrasource.macromedia.com/active/) as opensource and unsupported.

The last update was in 2003!! Yikes!

Yes, so Macromedia indeed killed it.  Making something open source when you provide no engineering for it, and there is NO community around it you might as well just not do it, Macromedia did that as a “show” for them supporting open source, and to fend off corporations when they said you are not supplying us the product we paid for…  But different matter 😉