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

Being from the Midwest (Okay, Cleveland but we are usally lumped into that area) the perspective is quite different.  Since I have (and will continue) to do quite a bit for work for non-profits will "marketing" towards small and mid-size business in the area, I'm quite use to "in-expensive" solutions and utilizing software as much as possible. It was actually uptime that brought me towards ACS (since I was looking for something for an email customers that didn't want to move to me for hosting at the time).

Looking at the services offered for free by Arsdigita (and reading "the book") is really what got my looking at ACS and since I really don't like Oracle, looking at OpenACS.

From my perspective was that ACS/OpenACS (from now on refered to as OpenACS) offered a great platform that could be expanded and have the features that many people wanted, at a reasonable price.  I then setup 6 sites for mid-sized customers for their INTERNAL networks (so I can show anybody them *grr*).

I think OpenACS gives everybody at rather good chance to present a well supported product, based on strong ideas to their customers, but the continued support and the show of support from the OpenACS community would benefit both sides.  Since, I believe, we are all fairly "spread out" I don't think marketing by the OpenACS community will step on those involed toe's.  I know my customers are not going to goto Arsdigita because of the price, but I show them OpenACS and they want something that I can not do or I don't have the time to do, it would be nice to be able to pull from the community so that I can support my customers.

Since I have been involved with a few GPL'd projects over the past 1/2 dozen years, I've seen things that I, personally, think can be done better.  Yes, the code has to be there, but a strong commitment from the community is one of the best selling points for anybody using/selling/support the software.  You can look at Linux and how distributions hiring developers (and/or support development) has help many of them gain the all important "mind share".

I agree that staying away from the Zope vs ACS debate (or at least not focusing on it) will be helpful and important as there is a larger market out there.  I still find it hard to believe that I'm seeing more and more sites based on the slashdot type model of community software, when I've yet to find ONE that will send me an email when something new and/or interesting comes up for discussion!

It might be worth looking at creating and/or supplementing some of the free services (uptime, clickthroughs, bboards, etc.) that Arsdigita does as a demostration of what OpenACS can do.  It is a small part, but I think it does give a nice place to view the operation of the software and yet give potential "customers" the ability to use it in a way that they want and not simply to dicussion the package themselves. Plus, we should port that stuff to Postgres anyway :)

Okay....off my soap box there.