Aside from an eWeek piece and a short mention by Dan Gillmor, the mainstream technology press has paid little attention to UserLand Software's decision to release the Frontier kernel as open source.
Outside of the UserLand community, I don't think that many people realize that Frontier's kernel represents the core functionality of two actively developed programs with thousands of Windows and Mac users. This isn't an example of moldy software being released into open source when it's no longer commercially viable.
I'm not familiar with an open source project that offers a comparable feature set as a unified whole: an integrated development environment, persistent object database, outliner, dynamic scripting language, Internet client and server, and Web services platform that supports TCP, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, XML, XML-RPC, SOAP, and RSS.
In Radio UserLand Kick Start, I focused on the two most important parts of the software -- the object database and UserTalk language -- because they're great for the rapid development of Internet software. Both are part of this planned open source release.
Even if the existing kernel code was never touched by a developer, amazing software could be built atop it. I hope some of the outliner junkies can pry the outliner out of the code and create a standalone program. I've been popping into Radio to use the outliner to create to-do lists, manage bookmarks, and draft magazine columns and other essays.
Two old-school Frontier developers, Jim Roepcke and Jeremy Bowers, are also jazzed by this move.
