Construction of Black Freight

I'm spent my career developing both proprietary software for companies and contributed to *many* open-source projects on an unofficial basis (never obtained the fabled labeled developer status)... :(

One of the projects I took the most pride in is the overhaul to the TS 2000 plus project at Trans-soft. I had started migrating the application to a Java infrastructure before the source line was closed when they merged with our compeitor CargoWise. The Transportation Logistics market is an interesting market in that companies come and go quite rapidly and there are so few companies that service the space.
The companies that do service the space are either extremely expensive; or they are developed with dead (read Visual Basic) or dying (read Delphi) programming environments. The reason to be concerned is that these companies will have a hard-time staying at the top of their game by taking advantage of the changes that come with the evolving architecture.
There are many that use hackish solutions by emulating web clients by using products like Citrix Metaframe and using their aging server architecture to 'serve' their dying applications and passing the costs to their customers.
After I had heard that my former employer agreed to no longer sell and develop the TS 2000 Plus application, I started on a design for an open Transportation Logistics application I have labeled Black Freight to be distributed by Coding Rage. I plan to blog about the design and development of many of the aspects of the application as we gear up for our first public release of the application.

My goal is to release the public alpha as "Free"; however, importing of data from customers of Magaya, CargoWise, former Trans-soft customers will be billed out on an hourly basis.

Stay tuned!

Can I play Ball 2?

It doesn't really matter the industry or the profession of the individual, but I always seem to run into 'protectionism' of the job. And it almost always results into damaging the company in some way or form.
Can't we all just work together to fix neat problems and make the world a geekier place to live in?