I just gave Steve's post about how ESRI's fleeting movement towards community based, open communication seems to have been quashed by a segment of the organization who are wed to 90's communication paradigms - slick marketing, throw sheets, and a tall shiny enterprise facade with nary a human in sight.

It is an interesting post, and although I've never been on the "inside", the people I know at ESRI are all fantastic and very dedicated to building great software and systems. This is what makes ESRI more than the sum of it's software. Yet this is sorely lacking in their communication strategy. So, being on the outside, the thing that comes to my mind is that there must be some layer in ESRI which is just not "getting" the whole open discussion = better control of the message. Since Jack seems to have

As Steve notes, open communications can also head off heated threads...

There was not one official word from ESRI anywhere clarifying this new stance on licensing. There was a heated thread going on and we all know that the ESRI folks read blog threads. We never see them officially answer anything there but from my logs and discussions with others, I know they read those kind of threads. Even if they don’t respond on the thread there should be somewhere they can address this issue in a formal manner. There was enough heat there to deserve a little bit of light.

While it's a small step, David Maguire's blog is just too "happy+shiny" to be taken as much more than repackaged marketing. For more on what it takes to have a good "CEO" blog (or any blog for that matter), check Seth Godin's free e-book 'Who's There?' 

Anyhow - to the point of the post - in the comments on Steve's post, Sean Gilles noted that someone posted to the OpenLayers mailing list re: an ArcGIS Server connector. A little digging on at OpenLayers.org, and here's the posting...

I'm working toward creating a layer class for the ArcGIS Server 9.1
MapServer Object web service.  So far I've created the AGS layer class by
extending OpenLayers.Layer.Grid and it seemed that I also needed to create
an AGS tile class by extending OpenLayers.Tile.Image. [continues...]

-- Brian Hatchl on OpenLayers "Dev" Mailing List Nov 29,2006
 

A Call to Action!
If everyone who does not like the ADF licensing model simply contributed 8 hours to this effort, we could have a free, robust, open, alternative that would address the needs of many many organizations. I mean - if I want to edit versioned vector data in a browser, then sure, I'll pay for the ADF because that's the powerful part of it's power. But if I just want to server up a simple map, with simple functions, then OpenLayers would be just fine. Just look at how many mashups were created wit GoogleMaps - clearly pushpins and seamless panning can cover a lot of use cases!  

Anyhow - looks like it's time to signup for the OpenLayers "Dev" list and dust off my Javascript!