37signals released Rails as open source because they perceived this would give them a competitive advantage, i.e. you get lots of people talking about 37signals whenever Rails is mentioned. It worked.

Joyent has gone a step further with the open sourcing of Slingshot and Connector. Read Joyent’s announcement.

Slingshot “allows developers to deploy Rails applications like a standard desktop application, which work online and offline (with synchronization), have drag and drop, and interact with all the other desktop applications”.

Connector is a suite of collaboration and communication applications targeted at small businesses. Here are the goodies.

Both of these are big news items: Slingshot is the first practicable mechanism for bringing web development (and web developers) into the desktop, which will no doubt be scary to the same people who dissed the iPhone SDK. Connector could be the missing piece for those who want to develop a collaboration suite because no existing on-line or desktop suite is the perfect fit.