4. HOW RELIABLE IS THE COMMUNITY?
(See part 1.)
None of the previous matters if the software isn’t useful, or if we are not allowed to use the software. The former is what we’re working on, but the latter is a very complex issue. Croquet is certainly not at critical mass. It could certainly go away. However, we feel it is immune at least from licensing plays such as those that have plagued the use of proprietary systems in higher ed, or those that have fractured the Java community. As the number of users in such systems grows, attempts for controlling proprietary lock-in have been very expensive. Croquet fights this in several ways: with an open source license in which all work on Croquet itself is available to anyone; with a P2P architecture that eliminates any advantage to “controlling the servers”; and with a dynamic language that eliminates any advantage to “controlling the release.” We feel that this last will be further strengthened by upcoming work in architecture and security, to be carried out here at UW. For the general health of the community, I look forward to upcoming announcements.
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About Stearns
Howard Stearns works at High Fidelity, Inc., creating the metaverse.
Mr. Stearns has a quarter century experience in systems engineering, applications consulting, and management of advanced software technologies. He was the technical lead of University of Wisconsin's Croquet project, an ambitious project convened by computing pioneer Alan Kay to transform collaboration through 3D graphics and real-time, persistent shared spaces. The CAD integration products Mr. Stearns created for expert system pioneer ICAD set the market standard through IPO and acquisition by Oracle. The embedded systems he wrote helped transform the industrial diamond market. In the early 2000s, Mr. Stearns was named Technology Strategist for Curl, the only startup founded by WWW pioneer Tim Berners-Lee. An expert on programming languages and operating systems, Mr. Stearns created the Eclipse commercial Common Lisp programming implementation.
Mr. Stearns has two degrees from M.I.T., and has directed family businesses in early childhood education and publishing.
