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> This is a personal, spare-time project ... I very much admire and appreciate the work you've done bootstrapping Abot in your spare time. Now that Microsoft is in the game, my concern is we will see a "tower of babel" type of situation develop for bots emanating from the corporate behemoths (i.e., here come the Facebook bots, Google bots, Amazon of course, and Apple might play catch up too at WWDC). I much prefer grass roots growing from open source projects like Abot so as to no be locked in (financially, legally, cognitively) to one platform run by a large corporation seeking world domination. Forensics specialist Jonathan Zdziarski wrote an interesting post recently titled "Free Software Always Costs Something" it is a good read -> http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=5948 Perhaps Abot would benefit from having its own Foundation similar to the likes of, say, the Apache Software Foundation https://www.apache.org/ ... "The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache Community of open-source software projects, which provide software products for the public good." As Satya Nadella commented in this recent Bloomberg interview http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-microsoft-future-ai-c... how app stores and Facebook remind him of the walled gardens of 25 years ago (e.g., AOL and CompuServe), its what he didn't say (intentionally omitted?) in this interview which strikes me as more interesting. The rise of chat bots and Nadella's views about them remind me somewhat of the vision General Magic had precisely 25 years ago with their forward thinking ideas about personal digital agents and Telescript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic ... if Nadella has indeed channeled some of the old ideas of 25 years ago and chat bots are to become the next big thing (Nadella thinks chat bots could be as big or bigger than the Internet itself, and the next logical step after app stores), and if indeed its time to break down walled gardens, then it would probably be very important for an implementation of chat bots to be a part of the global commons and available to all of humanity. Abot to the rescue? |
I'm very open to building a Foundation around this. My goal for Abot is to make it self-sustainable (paying salaries for key people to enable full-time development) and owned by everyone.
I admire the Apache Software Foundation for all the work they've done and can see a similar path forward with Abot. But recall that 24 hours ago it was really just me working on this. Give me another day or two :)