Aptana
You know, I’ve always promoted Aptana. It was the freely-distributable web IDE that I thought would one day put Dreamweaver to pasture. I wasn’t entirely right. It turns out that, much to my surprise, Aptana is no longer open source(They took out the “freely-distributable”). A reader of my blog recently sent me to http://mea-bloga.blogspot.com/2007/09/source-open.html. After reading that and the APL itself along with the Open Source Definition I have decided to withdraw from contributing to the project further.
As it appears, the subtle rewording to me is actually a way to rip off developers and users. Developers will contribute code, and Aptana will use them as free labor. Then, users are removed from the privilege to redistribute the app. There is no longer such a thing as giving you friend a copy of Aptana, just making them go to Aptana.com and get it themselves. What’s next? With such a move, shortly after acquiring RadRails, it sounds like once Aptana is done using those who contribute code and they have a full version, that they’ll probably charge you for it. This is just a guess, but who’s to say it won’t happen.
In closing I will say this: For as long as any page on http://*.aptana.com/* contains the words “open” and “source” in any order beside each other, the original, unaltered, binary will be available at http://opensource.kamisamanou.net(here soon) for download per the Open Source Definition unless for some reason I decide to remove it.
