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Honestly, I'd be happy if it were just open sourced with a heavy disclaimer about not being able to support users. If you see a piece of technology and have an

Honestly, I'd be happy if it were just open sourced with a heavy disclaimer about not being able to support users. If you see a piece of technology and have an idea you want to try, with an open system you can just get the source code and try it. With a closed system, the answer is "first, rewrite it from scratch..."

convolvatron 9y ago
its likely that its completely unusable off the machine thats running it and that there the author can't run it a month later (like grad student work) I guess you could argue that devoted interested parties would invest the time to tease out all the dependencies, get it integrated in common packaging systems, and spend some time debugging it. if you had an even slightly more devoted person they could make a production system using the demo as an inspiration. I don't know Bret personally, but he'd probably be likely to engage with that person and give feedback and advice.
- ryukafalz 9y ago
  >its likely that its completely unusable off the machine thats running it and that there the author can't run it a month later (like grad student work) That's possible, yeah. But I bet there are a lot of real-world lessons they learned in the process of building Realtalk (and previously Hypercard in the World) that wouldn't necessarily be apparent from a demo. For that matter, we don't even really know what the user experience is like - most of the pictures I've seen aren't high-res enough to see what the code looks like. Even if they're open to tours (which it sounds like they might be), I live on the other side of the country. I'm sure talking to Bret personally would be illuminating in that regard, but reading through the code and commit history can be illuminating in similar ways (doubly so if the authors were diligent about documenting things). Heck, even documentation on how to use Realtalk would be nice!

convolvatron 9y ago

its likely that its completely unusable off the machine thats running it and that there the author can't run it a month later (like grad student work) I guess you could argue that devoted interested parties would invest the time to tease out all the dependencies, get it integrated in common packaging systems, and spend some time debugging it. if you had an even slightly more devoted person they could make a production system using the demo as an inspiration. I don't know Bret personally, but he'd probably be likely to engage with that person and give feedback and advice.

ryukafalz 9y ago
>its likely that its completely unusable off the machine thats running it and that there the author can't run it a month later (like grad student work) That's possible, yeah. But I bet there are a lot of real-world lessons they learned in the process of building Realtalk (and previously Hypercard in the World) that wouldn't necessarily be apparent from a demo. For that matter, we don't even really know what the user experience is like - most of the pictures I've seen aren't high-res enough to see what the code looks like. Even if they're open to tours (which it sounds like they might be), I live on the other side of the country. I'm sure talking to Bret personally would be illuminating in that regard, but reading through the code and commit history can be illuminating in similar ways (doubly so if the authors were diligent about documenting things). Heck, even documentation on how to use Realtalk would be nice!