Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Open Source and business thoughts

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
  • Convince all our clients, that the software we develop for them will go back into the toolkit (aka. the old AD approach). This benefits them, as they will participate in the good software developed for other clients too.
  • Establish a communication platform, where (potential) clients can talk about their feature needs and get answers how they could solve this problem with existing software.
  • Joined marketing efforts:
    • Have a detailed "marketing compliant" feature list up on the net.
    • Exchange of marketing material concerning the OpenACS of all companies involved in the community.
  • Discussion of RFPs. This depends on a good deal of trust, but would help in the following way:
    • Get a good knowledge of the requirements in the market and how to tackle them with OpenACS
    • Reduction of individual software development cost, saving the reinvention of the wheel. E.g. if five companies need to make a multilingual site, an exchange between the five of them would reduce the individual cost for building this site and give them a competitive advantage {or less work for equal amount of money}
  • Establishing an OpenACS partner network which allows the easy buildup of virtual corporation for specific projects. This allows:
    • Tackling larger clients, as we can join resources
    • Strengthen the cooperation inside the community
    • Easy integration of freelancers into client projects
    • Have the developer of an application extend it, regardless whether the project is with the company of the developer. The latter would be paid for the development efforts as part of the virtual company though.
    • We could run our own network platform for the easy building of virtual companies based on the OpenACS. Have a look at http://www.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/~hanisch/diplom/book1.htm for an idea of what I'm talking about {abstract is in German, rest is English} 😉.

Crucial for the growths of the community are openness and cooperation between the companies involved with the OpenACS and joined (coordinated) marketing efforts. The more people know about us, the more are willing to contribute.

P.S.: Creation of an argumentation paper, why TCL is not bad as a development platform as long with a comparison of other open source platforms would probably help selling.