Thanks for the clear responses. So it sounds like you plan to let third party companies come in to help facilitate all of the other functions required here (helping existing companies get onto the Ripple network, monitoring/audit/security tools, fraud/risk modeling, POS, etc, etc) as opposed to building up that application suite yourself.
We will do what we can to drive adoption. Most of that will probably involve encouraging and assisting others. We plan to continue to develop client and server software for as long as necessary.
Another question -- is it possible to create, say, hundreds of new currencies (with distinct exchange rates against the existing currencies) within the Ripple network in a day without causing network problems? This would be for a genuine use case, not as spam.
Yes, that's not a problem.
Yes, we're not yet as open as you would like us to be. But we are already more open than pretty much every other payment system out there.
Joel, can you delete those "open" words until you really open the source code on the front page?
If you mean literally can I do it, no, I don't have access to the modify the web pages. If you mean do I think it would be a good idea to do that, I think it's not. The biggest difference between Ripple and every other payment network is that Ripple is much more open than other payment networks. As far as it being deceptive, the view that "open" means "open source" is, so far as I know, not a view that anyone actually holds.