Proprietary as all get-out, and it'll be even more so when I integrate it into the next generation of my server software (a general infrastructure for Web pages working along the general AJAX model [which, by the way, I was using long before somebody coined the cutesy acronym; my long-gone site www.marsglobalsurveyor.com had a smart browser front end that sent XML back and forth to the server, back in 2003]). That makes it highly specialized for the environment of my server and the way I build Web sites.

I once considered the similar proposition of licensing my software to others, and concluded that I'd have to either design it differently or go through a separate project to turn it into a product that could be easily installed on another server. So instead I'm operating using what the commercial side calls being an "application service provider", confusingly "ASP", and providing services to sites hosted on my server (or servers as it expands).

However, the AJAX model and related technologies like WebServices and XML SOAP opens up a very different way to approach openness that I think in the long run will be even more powerful: My server will have a series of interfaces which I can document and let other people use. For example, (skipping over considerations of security to make it simpler), another server could post a BBS message by putting it in a standard XML "wrapper", specifying things like which board it should go on and whether it's a reply to an existing message, and sending it to a particular URL on my server, where it will be injected into the message queue. This distribued services model lets people assemble Web applications at will by picking bits and pieces of services from all over the Net without having to install any specialized application software.

In other words, the open source model is already so twentieth century.

The idea of a tax credit sounds fine to me. I think Tom must've discovered that article and posted a stereotypically thoughtful Conservative analysis:

Open source developers are doing just fine without Big Brother poking his nose into it. It’s amazing to me how Liberals think that there is NOTHING worth doing that shouldn’t be invested with governmental oversight.

If that wasn't Tom, it was another summa cum laude graduate of the Republican School of Rhetoric...;-)