Oliver Steele

Decisions involve tradeoffs. Time at work subtracts from time with your family; money saved for the future subtracts from goods and services now; many food choices trade off among taste, convenience, price, and nutrition.

Some tradeoffs in computer science are the cost to update versus the cost to search, and execution time versus memory consumption. Tradeoffs in software development include implementation time versus execution time, and compilation time versus object code quality. Tradeoff in project management include resource pool size versus communications overhead, and cost versus time versus quality. These tradeoffs are some of the tradeoffs, respectively, in such tasks as choosing a data structure, algorithm, or cache size; choosing a programming language, a compiler and compiler settings; and choosing a project team size and personnel.

As of today, the Laszlo platform for building rich internet applications is open source. This includes everything: the server software, the client software, the examples, the documentation, the language — the whole platform. Like Mozilla, this is open source with a corporate sponsor; and like Mozilla, it’s honest-to-goodness open source — no dual licensing, no poison pill. It uses the Common Public License, listed on OpenSource.org.