As discussed at the ApacheCon we're thinking seriously about open
sourcing our project infrastructure platform (aka collaborative project
management platform).
We have been thinking about making our platform open source for quite
some time but we were not sure, whether this is an interesting project
for the open source community. At ApacheCon I was very glad to learn
that the topic seems to find quite a bit of interest.
Our vision is to build a platform for providing all necessary
infrastructure for running projects on the net. We want to provide
and/or integrate all applications and services required to successfully
build a project community.
Currently our platform supports document management, a closed
communication channel, workflows, administration of communities and some
industry specific applications.
Especially the administration of a wide spread community consisting of
individuals and members of various organizations is an interesting topic
where we've put quite some efforts into. We developed ways for inviting
new participants to projects, creating of groups of participants,
managing permissions for applications/services for them etc.
We're planning to extend our platform to enable integration of external
applications like mailing lists, version control systems, wikis etc.
Another possible extension would be a central portal for managing and
accessing all the applications and services.
Our platform is currently targeted to the real estate and construction
market (hence the construction industry specific marketing on our
website) but technologically it is completely agnostic to any specific
industry.
It is a J2EE application usings lots of Apache projects already.
Currently we're working on developing a business case based on an open
source software kernel. I see a quite clear win/win situation for the
open source community and for my company in making our platform open
source.
But I could use additional arguments and maybe knowledge about
successful business models based on open source software as I've been
asked to present this open source strategy to our board of directors on
the 22nd September. I hope to get a decision there to go on with it.
I would appreciate your feedback about the benefits you see in such a
platform. Would it generate the necessary interest within the ASF to
enter the incubator and to attract a vital community around the core
developers provided by us? Do you think the ASF would be a suitable
place for our open source project or shall we look for a differnt
place/community/license model?
Matthias Marschall, conject AG
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