Google and Microsoft together have joined the OpenAjax alliance, which is quite a funny fact, because Google actually is one of the co-finders of this alliance. It is a kind of weird when a co-founder delays its decision about joining a project that he created. This fact is a very important issue for the future of the Ajax, as having so many enterprises on board, who influences a lot the development of the hottest net application strategy of the last years will hopefully help them to develop a new strategy for Ajax development. A very important fact, which is quite forgotten by a lot of people, is that at the same time W3C is developing a new standard for Ajax, and this whole thing may turn OpenAjax vs W3C, and since i believe that W3C do not have a lot of credit lately, they better join forces with OpenAjax or they risk end their standard development which will be ignored by the vast majority of the browser developers. Important notice is that between those who participate in OpenAjax alliance there is a big important name missing – Apple Inc, i guess they are going to join at some point, cause all other major browser developers including Opera are there. Important to notice, that besides browser developers some big names for the server side applications and servers are there, such as BEA, Oracle, Sun and Sofware AG. The big question is who’s going to be the first to publish the specification, and who’s specification is going to be really adopted by the vendors.
Microsoft has announced, that it will open the source code of the FoxPro core modules to their CodePlex community development site. This announcement comes just a couple of days after telling the world, that the last FoxPro version, will be really the last FoxPro. FoxPro times have passed and a lot of products, even Microsoft itself with Access and SQL Server defines the borders and frontiers, where are not much space left for FoxPro, though for some of the cases FoxPro still may be one of the best choices available.
It seems, that the big corporation decide to make a commercial product into an “open source”, only in the case when this commercial product do not have a future anymore. A good example to compare would be Borland with its Interbase database (from closed to open source and back), and Sun with Star Office (closed->open source->both ways). It seems to be a pretty common practice, for a product survival, since Netscape has turned its dying Navigator into flourishing and powerful Firefox. I believe, that the decision of turning FoxPro open source is something, that should have appeared already some time ago, this way a lot of work and forces would be saved from disappearing.