Re: [gap-discuss] ANN: DataBasin 0.4

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,


On Sat, 05 Nov 2011 13:02:47 +0100, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

>     I don't think that a "local" version makes much sense at all.
>
> Why do you think so?  Our stance is that is the right way to do things.

Well, I think we all love our own stuff. We love our freedom.

However, I think it is pretty clear that business is oing to explore the  
way of the "service" in terms of SaaS and PaaS.
Like it or not. Maybe and perhaps hopefully it might not last in its  
current form, but ignoring it or "fighting" it is useless.
We all liked the command line, we liked fvwm, Emacs... there were clones  
of OpenLook and Motif. Now? Well at the end you can see many Linux  
distributions (just not to make names) as a slow, inefficient windows  
reimplementation.


>     On the short term, one can build open stuff using the platform  
> service
>     like Heroku or more limitedly the force.com platform itself.
>
> I don't know about them -- could you tell me in one sentence about each?

Well, to put it shortly, they allow you to build your own stuff, on their  
servers.
To make salesforce CRM they developed technology to give the software as a  
service. That makes it highly customizable, not just a "shrink-wrapped"  
software. That is, their built a platform
You can choose not just to use their software (and thus SaaS) but get the  
platform as a service, and thus PaaS (to throw in another buzzword). You  
can use the same database and the same language (Apex) to build your own  
stuff. You can even develop "free" stuff, although it runs on a strictly  
proprietary platform. It is thus your code on their base.

With Heroku you can go a step further and instead of using a proprietary  
platform, you can use Ruby or Java and you can also run those locally and  
have the benefit of local vs. remote.

With that, I state again the goal of DataBasin: it is a tool to allow you  
to interact, develop, extract the Data existing on the remote platform or  
service. Its goal is to be able to do that without tricks and by using  
free code that is capable of running on a free OS. Otherwise you will be  
again forced to use something proprietary to interact with such a system.
It may be beyond your freedom to choose to ignore that.

Just an explanation without a judice.

Riccardo