Looks like we made the papers again. It's always a worry when you get interviewed by one of the major broadsheets -- sometimes you just come off second best. Although not exactly what I said, it seems like my 30 minute interview has been distilled to mostly accurate sound bites. Overall the article is an interesting read -- of course, you need to see the physical paper to catch me mug shot!
The snippets about FarCry CMS follow, and the whole article can be found here on the SMH website
And some Australian businesses are making some big calls.
One is Daemon Software, specialising in web content management on Macromedia's Cold Fusion application server. Last year, Daemon CEO Geoff Bowers bravely decided to put the source code of his company's main product, FarCry, into the public domain for free download.
"We had a cutting-edge solution which was successful in its implementation," Bowers says, citing FarCry users such as Blue Scope Steel (formerly BHP Steel), Roche Pharmaceuticals and the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption.
"So we were not 'end-of-lifeing' it by throwing it to the wind through open source," he says. "The issue we were facing was several hundred competitive solutions, all vying for the mind-share."
Bowers says content management systems are becoming impossible to patent, so the decision to go to open source was justified by his company's server licence revenues being less than its services revenues. And so far, the source code has only been used by one other commercial developer, in South Australia, so freely publishing it has not cost Daemon any business.
"Product promotion for mind-share would put us out on a limb for attracting investment," he says, "while decreasing product development. There are some tremendously bad systems out there, but if you have a lot of marketing dollars, you can get into the enterprise space.
"The reality is they have a head start on us with marketing and distribution. But some people are very keen to embrace the (open-source) philosophy."
Thus, the FarCry code was put out to open-source developers with even fewer restrictions than the Free Software Foundation's General Public Licence; knowing that as the code's creator, Daemon would be a preferred tenderer for any custom modifications, it didn't want anything to inhibit wide corporate adoption.
Indeed, Bowers reports hundreds of independent contacts from which he might derive some business, with training revenue currently replacing lost licence revenue.
"We've had some really significant functionality contributed by people independent of us," he says. "And there has been a tremendous turnaround in morale in our development team."
"Now that we have gone open source, our developers are celebrities in their own field. And they work harder and longer."
Software's open war
By Eric Wilson
March 16, 2004
Posted by modius at 08:51 AM | Permalink
Trackback: http://blog.daemon.com.au/cgi-bin/dmblog/mt-tb.cgi/222
