Let's debunk a few more claims.
If you go on the runrev webpage presenting enterprise case studies, as of today, you will find this:
The part that I am interested in is "Learn how NASA, the University of Vienna and others use Rev."
It is about how "NASA used revolution for the Landsat program". In the article, there is mention of "United States Geological Survey" but the headline really makes mention of NASA.
On April 5, 2008, I had taken contact with Chris Wilkinson, at NASA, at the time referenced as head of the landsat operations. I told him that I was trying to establish whether NASA effectively used their software to support key operations of their Landsat program as written on the runrev page.
His reply was that NASA doesn't use runrev for controlling LandSat 7. LandSat 7 is a project managed by the Geological Survey.
Minor mis-attribution? Perhaps. Or perhaps not so minor.
If you check the ui-interface
.
It really looks like a metacard interface, it looks quite old. Brush metal look was characteristic of Panther, introduced in 2003 (Source: wikipedia). Landsat 7 has been shelved long ago. The first mention of Landsat 8 that I could find is December 2005.
I had similarly enquired about the second case study, University of Vienna. "University of Vienna uses Revolution to managing 60,000 students and staff".
In 2005, Runrev CEO started to mention University of Vienna. As I was then an academic, I wrote on the runrev mailing list to ask about University of Vienna's use of revolution. I never had anybody from university of Vienna coming forward. I received a reply off list, from a German list reader who assured me that University of Vienna was using Metacard, not revolution.
Compare the visual interface for applications that are listed on the Production Applications page of the metacard website.
and this:
The first application has been designed with Metacard, it is featured on the metacard website. Metacard was developed by Scott Raney. Runtime Revolution Ltd acquired metacard in 2003). The second one looks #very# similar. At the very least, it looks nothing like the most recent versions of revolution.
The person cited in the article is "Hartmut Eich". There is clear evidence that he is still using metacard, with participation on the metacard mailing lists up to 2008. The most recent mention of him that I could find on the runtime revolution list is in October 2004.
So NASA and University of Vienna use revolution? There is evidence that they were fervent users of hypercard and/or metacard. When metacard was acquired by revolution, they may have given the Revolution IDE a try... but it is not clear at all that they have made the switch. After runrev's acquisition of Metacard, it remained possible to update the open source Metacard IDE with the new version of the revolution engines but the Metacard IDE itself was not officially supported anymore. Using only publicly available information, I couldn't find evidence that they remained customers very long. 2004, at best 2005.
Nevertheless, runrev uses the present tense all over their article.
