(from the post:)

        Second, now that I am no longer held back by big-company legal
    restrictions, I am going to be much more involved with the platform.
    Very soon I will post some new example code. Some others are
    working on new documentation and build tools to ease that pain as well. 
    Starting this fall, my new company will also start to offer online and
    in person training and mentoring courses to your team get up to speed
    quickly.  We can also finally get started in that book.

        My goal is that by the end of the year, any average developer can pick 
    up SproutCore, build, and deploy a basic app without feeling lost. This
    is open source and I can’t usually guarantee timelines but at least now
    we can do what we need to make it happen.

This is very welcome news. I had tried to start using SproutCore for a project earlier this year and ended up just using Rails with a more standard front-end because I already knew Rails, I was learning a few other technologies at the same time and SproutCore had very little documentation. If they can bridge that gap, I'm very very excited about where SproutCore could go.

Cappuccino vs Sproutcore. Preferences? Opinions? Experiences?

I've got an upcoming project for which I want to use one of those, and am leaning toward Cappuccino b/c it seems like more of a complete platform than a collection of cool widgets. But haven't had time to get my hands dirty with either yet, so maybe my first impression is wrong. Anyone used both yet?

This is incredible. You heard it here first - this is a direct competitor to Sencha. It was even mentioned in the post that licensing is not the way to go.

Charging to develop on a platform/within a framework is something that Apple and Microsoft do. Look at the proliferation of Java and Rails and I think you'll agree free, no-friction entry is the best way to go.

Yeah, because Microsoft and Apple are two companies that clearly failed while Sun and 37 Signals are clearly successful multi billion dollar businesses.

The last sentence of the original post could very well be the most sarcastic post on the internet, if it was intended so.

I really should start including the tags, shouldn't I?

Yeah (sorry for down-voting you) - there are so many anti-propreitary rantings around here that it's hard to separate out the sarcastic people who acknowledge the objective reality from the standard propreitary always == bad!!!! kool-aid drinkers.

Odd choice of comparison. I think linux has owned ms and apple on the server side. mysql is the dominant db for web apps, etc.

If your metric of success is a company that makes money you are ignoring a large part of the world.

Just depends on how you define "success" (although I think being acquired and gutted by Oracle is outside anyone's definition).

Wonder if seeing sencha get 14m has anything to do with his decision