Dave Winer posted this announcement today. Here is my prediction.... Sales of Manilla and Radio will go up.

Why would the sales go up when the core is going to be given away? For a history I look back at my own history with UserLand's products. I had read a little about Frontier and was quick to start using Clay Basket. Later in 1996 I started using Frontier and quickly fell in love. But it was far more than a product. In those days Frontier was a freeware product (not open source) and there was an active community supporting it. Frontier had a wonderfully logical methodology of editing scripts (outlines) and was extremely powerful after a few quick scratches of the surface. Then came the dark days... with a need to be paid a fair amount for a software package Frontier became a non-freeware product. I completely understand the need for the development to be paid for and do not take issue with the decision. It had, however, unfortunate consequences in terms of the community. At the same time the community became more tightly focused around the brilliant minds at UserLand and in the eyes of an average user withered and changed.

I've licensed various versions of Frontier along the way. It remains a great product. I haven't had time to stay up with Manilla and stopped licensing it some time ago. It will be interesting to watch what happens with this open source project... will there be Linux support forthcoming? It is conceivable, depending upon the licensing settled upon, that somebody will use the Frontier kernel to out Manilla Manilla. Very cool. Thanks Dave! Stay Tuned.