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The Joel on Software Discussion Group (CLOSED)

I founded Chili!Soft. We didn't use Mainsoft except for HP-UX, and that was horrible. For the Linux implementation, Dave Weaver basically reverse engineered COM for Linux so Chili!Soft ASP would run. From there we ported to Solaris, I think, or we replaced the Solaris version with that. We even built it for the RS-6000 and (gulp) the S/390. As though anyone would let a VB developer code for their mainframe, but I digress.

The licensing was stupid and still is. I tried to make it free but got shot down--being a founder isn't all it's cracked up to be when you're surrounded by VC-approved morons.There was plenty of opportunity to make money through the free model, and yeah, no developer was going to reach into his own pocket at 2500/cpu or 495 per server--the tow dramatically different and stupid pricing models for something MSFT gave away for free. And no, MSFT didn't come up with it first.

Um...okay.

What are you replying to?

Yeah I think there was a book that implements a clean-room ASP back in the day. Cool read.

> What are you replying to?

I think it may be in response to one of Joel's articles.

Charlie what are you up to now since the founding of Chilisoft?

Ah, I did a search. http://www.missionresearch.com/

Spam engines for NGOs. $299.

Uh.... That's your brilliant idea? ;-)

I did a project using ChiliSoft ASP on Solaris in late 2001. Customer was a Sun shop with a manager who knew some VB, so that was how Chlisoft was picked.  The main problem we had was that the licensing engine would tell us the software wasn't licensed every day, and would kill the server, so we had to restart the server every day after the license check.  Sun offered to check it out but the customer wouldn't let Sun on their box.  There were lots of missing bits of ASP like Server.Execute... we eventually convinced the client to switch over to windows and that was that.

Yeah, I blew the post--was in response to a posting about why Fog Creek wasn't on Sun ASP.

I'm not sure what the deal was with the licensing issue--I left at the end of 1999, right before the Cobalt deal.

The new company is great--and no, we're not giving a spam tool to nonprofits. Nonprofits survive on donations from supporters, do relationship management is pretty important. GiftWorks is donor relationship management--tracks donations, mailings, interactions, etc. You should check out hte SmartLists query builder--pretty cool. The presentation source is in there--just check out the directories.

By the way, we just tried Joel's Co-Pilot--very cool. Really helped with a tech support issue yesterday.

I was always interested in Chilisoft ASP for converting customers from a pure ASP solution to a ASP on *nix solution on the way to a LAMP stack.

I never knew enough about it to be able to recommend it and was never able to successfully get and evaluate it myself.  Is is still around/available?

And more importantly, does anyone have any (recent) experience with it?

It's still around. http://www.sun.com/software/chilisoft/index.xml

It's funny they call it Sun Java System Active Server Pages 4.0--there's no Java in it, or wasn't a few years ago. And they refer to "Windows NT"... Such religion. The COM-Java bridge in it works pretty well from what I can remember, but that was 5 years ago.