Gadgetopia

As good a time as any: Dave Winer announced today that the kernel of Manila and Radio — the object database code — will be open-sourced sometime in the next few months.

To fans of UserLand Software it must seem inevitable that the kernel will go this way, it sure did to me. But I am on the board of directors of the company, and I persuaded my fellow board members that it would be in the company’s interest to let the kernel develop separately from the products that build on it.

Don’t get too excited, however — these are the ugly guts of the system, written in C. It will take a fair amount of work for someone to do anything constructive with it.