Your comments in The Art of Unix Programming about Apple/Mac developers being diametrically opposed to Unix developers in development style and emphases (designing simple, user-friendly interfaces from the outside in) were quite interesting. I am wondering about your perspective on Apple now. My interest is specifically in Apple's contributions to open-source (WebKit and LLVM, chiefly) and your take on those. It seems to me that Apple has done quite a bit to foster an alternative ecosystem to the GNU environment, for instance in FreeBSD's adoption of clang as their default compiler; and also it seems to to me that WebKit has supplanted Gecko as the most widely used browser framework. Curious about your viewpoint here.

...than either AOO and LO. Much more optimized for OS X. And its engineering team of two is supported by their user base, not by IBM or Oracle or whosever, so that they can work full-time on improvements. Still open source, of course (GPL). It's a real success story. See http://www.neooffice.org./

I see no problem with requiring payment from users even if the product is open-source. How do you fund development? I happily paid the $10 to the NeoOffice developers to download the latest binary of NeoOffice. And I paid the two bucks for Growl. In the case of NeoOffice, the $10 is worth it to save myself the 24 hours or so it takes to build the entire behemoth. As for Growl, it would have been better had the source been available from the get-go, but it's a small developer team that's overwhelmed with support requests because 1.3 is actually a huge update. I think they're prioritized correctly. If paying for an OSS product offends you, consider it a service charge for the convenience of a pre-compiled binary. "Support services" are one of the few Slashdot-approved ways of actually getting paid for your OSS work, aren't they?

This sounds very promising and interesting--a robust cross-platform GUI-development platform. However, I've always been a bit baffled by the idea of Mozilla/XUL as a "development platform." It is so unlike the environments I'm used to (Tcl/Tk, AppleScript/Cocoa, Python/wxPython) that I'm not clear what one does with it. So here are some questions:

1. Can one do general-purpose GUI application development with Mozilla/XULrunner--using JavaScript instead of Python or Tcl as the programming language? (i.e. is there finally a good reason for a non-web-dev to learn JavaScript?)

2. Does developing with this environment require one to do hacking in C++? (I'm not interested in hacking with C++.)

3. Can anyone point me to applications that already exist that make use of Mozilla as a development deployment platform? I'm already familiar with Firefox, Thunderbird, and Komodo. Are there any others? (i.e. that are standalone apps and don't run as Firefox extensions, say?)

4. What kinds of applications are *not* feasible with this development platform?