Here's an interesting audio interview with Dave Temkin, CTO of Laszlo Systems. They cover some important topics and Dave makes some great points that explain why OpenLaszlo is so exciting.

They discuss why Laszlo was open sourced, why open source software is so important, what the ideas behind Laszlo's design are, why Laszlo uses Flash, how it actually operates at a higher level independent of Flash, what the technologies that led to the Laszlo application language were, how Laszlo integrates open standard technologies, how it relates to AJAX and DHTML, which companies and applications use Laszlo, which software development tools support Laszlo, how the user base is growing now that it's open source, what kinds of reusable components and widgets are Laszlo Systems developing, what opportunities exist for web developers and user interface designers, and where Laszlo is headed in the future.

There's a lot I like about OpenLaszlo. It has all of the advantages and none of the problems of the NeWS Window System, which was a technological success that failed because it was proprietary. I was daydreaming about having a system like Laszlo in 1998, and while I was intrigued by Flash, I avoided it for all the obvious reasons. But nothing can hold a candle to Flash's market penetration, graphical quality, and consistency across platforms.

The important thing about OpenLaszlo, which will ensure its long term success, is that it doesn't lock you into the Flash player, even though it takes advantage of Flash as a standard ubiquitous runtime. Laszlo is abstract from the Flash player, and it will output to other platforms over time as they mature, such as DHTML, Java and .NET.

Laszlo is also 100% Buzzword Compliant: it's a declarative constraint based prototype object oriented JavaScript programming model, with xml-centric distributed asynchronous data binding and replication. (Too bad "DCBPOOJSPMWXCDADBAR" doesn't spell anything cute like "AJAX".)

The interview is an audio "podcast," and there's no text transcript available, but here's the blurb about it:

Before AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) had a name, there was Laszlo Systems, a software tools developer using AJAX-like methods along with with Macromedia's Flash player to deliver richer Web experiences. David Temkin tells us why he chose the Flash player as a platform. Laszlo went open source and chose IBM's Common Public License as it was flexible enough to fit their needs without curbing commercial use.

David plans to leverage rich client environments other than Flash Player, such as DHTML, Java and .Net and shares his about thoughts about Eclipse, the recent Adobe/Macromedia merger, refactoring the desktop user interface and calendar interoperability. He also explains why Flash is not an ideal platform for mobile devies and desktop applications and compares Laszlo Blog Boxes to widgets in Apple's Dashboard and Yahoo's Konfabulator.