Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Sustainable growth of OpenACS and dotLRN

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2: Re: Sustainable growth of OpenACS and dotLRN (response to 1)
Posted by Frank Bergmann on 01/16/04 11:45 AM
Hi Volodja,

<blockquote> Would be interesting to here your thoughts on this
</blockquote>

very, very interesting. My thoughts are going into the same direction, even though I'm coming from selling a particular application that resides on top of the toolkit.

In the last 8 weeks I've been talking to some 10 potential customers, amongst them a HP division here in Barcelona. My summary:
- The small (unsophisticated ones) are not interested in the toolkit as long as the software works for them and
- HP and another larger company were much more interested in the details of the toolkit, got repelled by the fact that TCL isn't PHP, but cought some confidence when they heard "Oracle" and my explanations that (Open)ACS is just a "thin layer on top of Oracle...".

HP was particularly impressed by hearing about Siemens Sharenet (there are some cool reports in Google).

<blockquote> There should be funding coming from the toolkits
adopters for IT developers
</blockquote>

That doesn't seem to be easey... There has been some discussion about a "Partner License" that I've (partially) proposed in several discussions. This license aims to formalize exactly that: A software license that requires implementer to sign a "certified partner" contract that requires them to contribute a "fair" amount to the community (for example 20% of project revenues including PLed code), and then distribute the 20% according to the packages implemented and their developers. However, the distribution rules are not easy to define...

(My) conclusions for OpenACS:
- Separate the devloper pages from some "customer" web pages
- Publish a list of reference projects and customers in a very prominent place in the customer pages
- Publish the list of consulting companies providing services around the toolkit
- Provide a "sales guide" to explain advantages/disadvanates of OpenACS in comparison with XXX (PHP toolkitz)

I'm trying to follow these ideas with http://www.project-open.com/ and -.org which are suposed to be the customer and developer sites for Project/Open (the site is incomplete. We're working on a complete overhaul). Future will tell whether it works out...

Frank

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4: Re: Sustainable growth of OpenACS and dotLRN (response to 2)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 01/17/04 11:15 AM
"repelled by the fact that TCL isn't PHP", gosh, I'm sure glad my income doesn't depend on selling projects to "sophisticated" customers like that. (I'm afraid I wouldn't be very good at, and would hate it even if I was.)

Of course OpenACS is not "just a thin layer on top of Oracle", never was, and has probably become substantially less so since Philip first made that bogus claim way back when. On the other hand, emphasizing the importance and power of the data model perhaps a bit more difficult to do), seems very much appropriate to me. AFAIK the emphasis on and quality of the underlying data model is still the single biggest factor differentiating OpenACS from other toolkits.

Regardless, these sorts of hands-on "marketing from the trenches" anecdotes are interesting, thanks for posting, Frank.