Mar4
Open Source Collaber
Even thought making Collaber a open source software is alive in our minds, recently we got some requests for it.
We have been thinking about the positives and negatives of doing so.
The efforts we put in the Collaber is worth around 1 million dollars including the investment and time. How to recover that amount after making it open source?
There seems to be many people who are interested in joining the project. But how about co-ordination and preventing from having forks?
We want to make it an Open source alternative to Groove.
We invite your suggestions on this regard.
8 Responses to “Open Source Collaber”
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Chris
Said this on March 7th, 2007 at 4:25am:Collaber as Open Source
Answering this question is more difficult than with a typical application because of the ‘extensibility’ of Collaber in the first place. I am referring to the ability to make ‘Custom Tools’ – which would be available to the public whether Collaber is open source or not. This was the feature that made Groove 3.1 so powerful and also so threatening ; as illustrated by the fact that Microsoft has removed it from its current incarnation.
As such, I believe Collaber has more options than just open source or not open source. Those options are essentially …
* Open source & Free* (or minimal cost) – make money on tools/ads/features
* Closed source & Free* (or minimal cost) – make money on tools/ads/features
* Closed source & paid
*Free meaning some sort of Free with limit, pay a small fee ($30-$100) for ‘Pro’ or Free with Ads
Distribution of Collaber
In order to be successful as a development framework – wide distribution is required. Price will play a major role in this.
But equally important will be the frameworks ‘stability’ . In other words, if you are going to encourage developers to make ‘tools’ for the end users, then the framework should be stable & without ambiguity. (Tool developers would hate to have to deal with multiple ‘flavors’ of the Collaber Framework)
For these reasons - I tend to focus on the second option ‘Closed source & Free’.
End User Acceptance Tool Marketplace Big Guy ‘Buyout’Threat Distribution Another Open Source Threat
Open & Free Very Likely Very Likely Not Likely Very Likely Not Likely
Closed & Free Very Likely Very Likely Likely Very Likely Possible
Closed & Paid Likely Less Likely Less Likely Less Likely Possible
Monetization
Would people buy a Collaber license? Yes, I think they would. However, you would have to have a strong marketing budget & a highly finished GUI in order to compete with Groove. This is because I think most people are unaware of what Groove is & what it can do. Groove / Collaber is literally a distributed OS – It is not just a PIM app that most people think it is. I’d pay because I know this. Most others will be a much harder sell.
Collaber has one ‘Killer’ feature that could do away with the need for a huge marketing budget – viral distribution.
Using viral distribution, some sort of Free-ish version and open Tools – I see Collaber taking off. Perhaps you can consider sending out open source later on-if the Tool marketplace emerges.
Chris
Said this on March 9th, 2007 at 9:00am:Sorry - table didn’t display well!
Chris
Said this on March 9th, 2007 at 9:13am:Interesting idea for your consideration.
Open Source the Collaber Framework - not any of the the tools.
No Files. No Task manager. Just OS the the bare bones! Syncing. Maybe Chat & VOIP.
You would immediately cause a big stir in the open source community & possible MS competition coverage.
Take a look at the WROX book - Professional DotNetNuke 4 - it has a very good story about how Shaun Walker (the Originator of DNN) started it as Open Source & managed to limit forks by Trademarking the DNN name.
Consider OS the Collaber Framework then Trademark Collaber to allow you to control hostile forks.
I think this offers Huge potential!
cm
Satya
Said this on March 10th, 2007 at 2:15am:I think Free software is the a very smart decision. It brings more developers to the team and more involved users. There are lot of good services out there to help you interact with the users: e.g., launchpad.net
One option would be to do what other major Free software products are doing: make most of it available under free software license, but charge for features useful in organizations: such as integration with MS exchange, integration with LDAP and restricted versions for corporate data security.
Collaber has one big advantage over Groove — being written in Java, it can be multi-platform. With cross-functional teams working on different operating systems, multi-platform is a requirement and Groove fails to provide it. Plus Collaber could be integrated into Eclipse development environments. The possibilities are endless.
Bryan J. snow
Said this on March 16th, 2007 at 12:38am:Just build-in a (small) advertising component. You can then resell the space!! Let the open source community spread your tool/deployment while you get a healthy revenue stream.
François Rey
Said this on June 6th, 2007 at 4:03pm:I believe making the product open source would be your smartest move: it would give you a key differentiator with MS Groove and would allow your network to grow faster than what the proprietary approach could do. With a growing network, the opportunities for a company to provide additional products and services grows accordingly.
Groove is already well established and mature, and is likely to grow in the corporate world since it’s bundled and integrated with Office Enterprise. Adopting a strategy where you are head-to-head with MS is asking for trouble and would require serious motivations. Groove 2007 is included ‘for free’ in Office Enterprise edition, and a price war with MS is not desirable.
Instead, try to develop your business where they can’t: go open source and integrate with other open source initiatives such as Jabber, which is a well established network, and also a good example of a both non-profit (Jabber foundation) and commercial company (Jabber Inc.). While the foundation manages the development of the open source technology, the corporation deploys it in the corporate world through its service offering. You might want to get in touch with them to get some advice.
If you like to ensure you have a sufficient return on investment, you could go open source progressively.
For example you can make the client free and open source, and keep the relay server proprietary for a certain time. In doing so make sure the community understand your commitment to open source and your need to recuperate your investment.
Another approach since you own the source code is to have dual licensing like VirtualBox is doing, and keep the features targeted to business use proprietary, see http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Editions.
Make the public server free, but ask for a fee when its comes to setup a private server.
You already use Eclipse RCP, so making the move to open source should not be such a major undertaking provided that you followed the modularity and coding standards.
Being based on RCP also means that you can possibly make Collaber easily integrate into Eclipse IDE. If not already done, you perhaps could also benefit from Eclipse Communication Framework, and vice-versa.
Which gives me another great idea: integrate with an open source SCM like SVN or GIT, or better, make your own distributed SCM within Collaber, making it easy for people to collaborate without the need to have a server.
Believe me: the open source community is much more “receptive” to your product than the business community, simply because it understands the need to collaborate and go beyond the corporate boundaries. If you embrace already existing networks and communities such as the one around Jabber and Eclipse, you have a wild fire propagation and an opportunity to develop a collaborative network much faster than what MS can do.
Mahmoud
Said this on July 5th, 2007 at 5:44pm:I think that your application EULA seems to violate the LGPL license TinyMCE and EPL for other projects since you do not state that you are using these projects specifically in your EULA as required by their licenses.
Frank Drews
Said this on September 5th, 2007 at 6:48pm:My Experiences with other OS groupware tools:
We are using different OS groupware tools: e.g. Egroupware, nuxeo-cps (similar to Plone)and joomla to manage different European projects. We wouldn’t have dared to choose them, if there hadn’t been a commercial support available. The most money we paid concerned telephone support, for installation trouble shooting, advanced configuration, and some questions new users just will always have.
We are thinking about financing some additional features at the moment, too. I think once you have users, who use your software, their soon will be a demand for support and the coding of additional features. You could host server, or maintain servers, running somewhere else.
You may have different editions, like zimbra http://www.zimbra.com
I know going OS is a realy big decision, but I think it gives you much more customer-attention at once. You should think about hiring somebody who is sort of a professional going OS consultant … I think this may pay off. There should be books regarding OS-business models, too.
Frank