By way of introduction I am a enterprise software product manager that, in previous lives, ran nonprofits delivering technology training and services to underserved (poor) communities.
I have been evaluating OpenACS as a potential solution to the fact that nonprofits can't afford the web-based collaboration software my company creates, but access to excellent software tools would magnify the impact of their work exponentially.
The vision is a software company that builds solutions for the nonprofit sector funded via contracts with large nonprofits (fully funded design phase of the software value chain). aD can't be the model since they are building an OSS app that requires too much hardware and depends on non-OSS components (Oracle). The company would be funded as a social enterprise which means it would access VC-like funding, but without the presure for 10x returns that apparently did aD in.
Besides the design phase, it would derive revenue from the other phases of the software value chain Rafael outlined, but only in the nonprofit sector. Since the output is open source, the commercial OpenACS community would benefit from R&D and innovation. Since the company is focused on the needs of the nonprofit sector, there wouldn't be any competition with an 800- pound Gorilla for the folks focusing on small eccommerce and other commercial installations.
The issue is that the Open Source business model is not a super effective one. aD seems to be building an open source model without a Noosphere-- odd concept.
Is OpenACS evolving into something like enhydra.org where their is a strong community of both commercial and non-commercial developers? (Yet enhydra.org has almost no useful applications availiable- the companies seem to keep the applications for themselves)
