Application development Toolkit

Start-up aims at beating MS and Macromedia to next-gen Web Apps

Tags:
.NET,
Flash,
XML,
LZX

Paul Festa CNET News

Published: 19 Nov 2004 15:40 GMT

How have developers reacted to your open-source offer?
There's been a huge, huge response. We did as many downloads and developer registrations the first three days (after last month's release) as we had in the previous six months, roughly 3,000 downloads of the Laszlo Presentation Server. We're also talking to industry heavyweights who have strategic interests in having an open-source, rich-client platform that isn't proprietary and controlled by a single vendor, a zero-install rich Web experience on an open-source platform. And we expect those companies to contribute.

Who are some of your partners?
There's Akamai. We're working closely with them. And we're working closely with others in the industry who are interested in seeing an open-source, rich-client standard. We can't say who right now, but there are other companies in the industry who have an interest in having a standard of this kind.

It seems like Yahoo would be interested in something like this. Yahoo bought Oddpost to beef up their Web mail application and has embraced PHP.
We'll announce who it is when we're ready to announce who it is. But we are talking to a lot of companies of that type: large Web application providers and some infrastructure providers.

How seriously do you think Macromedia is taking your open-source offering?
Macromedia has already responded to this. On the very day we announced, Macromedia said that Flex now has a free non-commercial licence that will be available in November. Interpret it as you will. But they're responding to this on a marketing basis. If I'm an application developer and I have a choice between something that is closed and proprietary, that costs $12,000 for two CPUs, and is linked to the Flash 7 client, or I can use an open-source product that offers me wider deployment options because I can use Flash 5 and 6 and it's unencumbered, what am I going to choose?

[Macromedia responded that Flash 7 distribution has reached 76 percent of PCs. "The advantage of running on Flash Player 6 is fleeting at best," a company representative said.]

Do you really think Macromedia made the free Flex announcement in response to your open-source giveaway?
When we announced this, Macromedia had their talking points out there and said this is the last act of a dying company. They didn't say it in public, but it was a very consistent message that we got from more than once source. Our funding announcement refutes that, of course. [Laszlo has received a $5 million Series B funding round led by Mitsui Venture Partners.]

This is a move that we have been considering for six months. We brought in experts in open source, including Doc Searls, Andre Durand and Brian Bellendorf, and we talked to them at length on how this works and doesn't work. And we as a company have participated as consumers of open-source software.

For example?
The Laszlo Presentation Server includes a number of open-source packages. We use the Apache HTTP client and Tomcat [an open-source servlet container], and we bundle that with our product.

The obvious question is that with your flagship software now available open source and free of charge, how are you going to make money?
For those who have downloaded the open-source client, we offer support and training. Second, we're going to do custom application development. Customers will come to us and say, "I love those apps. I want your design talent applied to my problem." Third, we will offer commercial applications on top of this open-source platform. We will have a shopping cart, for example, or a Web email application built on top of this. That's over the course of 2005.

Setting aside the benefits of open source for a moment, how are you going to convince developers to choose you, a little-known start-up, over Macromedia and Microsoft when it comes to deciding on a platform?
We've been around longer than Flex. We're deployed on more prominent services, including EarthLink, SBC Yahoo's broadband service, and the La Quinta home page. Some of these sites have millions of users. This is a very stable and robust platform.

So look at the alternatives: Laszlo, a small start-up -- and yes, people get uneasy about that -- or Macromedia. With Macromedia, the question isn't if the company goes away, but what if it stops supporting Flex? Macromedia has a track record of cancelling server products, a whole raft of them -- Generator, Aria, LikeMinds, Spectra, SiteSpring. In the commercial world, the size of a company doesn't guarantee the stability of a platform. Macromedia's solvency isn't what determines what's supported in 10 years. Open-source software gets immortality, in a way, if it ever sees adoption. My belief is that you can't get a new platform adopted unless you're open source or unless you're Microsoft.

Take, as an example, JBoss, PHP, Python, Perl, Eclipse to a certain extent -- these have been massively adopted and they're all open source. I can't think of a broadly adopted proprietary platform that's been widely adopted in the last five years. .Net is the exception that comes to mind -- and that's Microsoft.

Apart from being comparatively insulated from the strategic vagaries of private companies, what else makes open source more attractive to developers?
Proprietary platforms are just not how developers think today. High-priced proprietary platforms stand in the way of casual development experimentation and interest and make it much harder to justify the purchase of one of these systems. With open source, you can -- and do -- have grassroots deployments within the enterprises. With proprietary platforms, you have enterprise sales driving top-down adoption. Laszlo has lived through this. We know what it's like trying to get a proprietary platform adopted -- not without some success. But it's a tough battle.