rohitj's domain

I have been thinking about business models for open source softwares. Though I couldn’t come up with proper answer. Lets see, let me try to start with different software people make and use.

Office : No doubt it needs very big amount of work. And if someone puts this much effort to make an Office package, why will he give it away for free? Of course not, it doesn’t make sense. Probably thats the reason why we do not have any open-source Office software. And surely Microsoft Office is way too good. OOo is dumped for long time now.

Matlab, Visual Studio etc : Again it requires big amount of investment and hard work. No reason one should give it away for free. Though yeah Eclipse is there. And I must say that it is very good. But isn’t it a way in which IBM is earning publicity? And isn’t it same with netbeans as well.

Computer Games : Again too much work and proficiency.

Operating System : Again, do you think open source can help make an Operating System any better? Oh yeah, bug fixing.. probably yes, but without incentive why will someone do quality work? Every second day one thing or another is broken. But yeah surely, like Redhat is doing, good things are possible with it, specially for server side technologies.

Other Desktop Applications :  Amarok, they are fighting to get funds… Is there any good voice chat client? Ekiga? does support proxy. Skype? no more an open source project. Gaim? not yet. Now don’t say that they are fighting in reverse engineering and other bullshit. Firefox? don’t you know that people start with Firefox but do not stick to it for long time. Thats a popular observation, isn’t it. Evolution? I wish they come up with something good. Though I guess they are also having problems (because of open source nature? I guess yes.)

I am not saying that open source is right or wrong. But at the end of the day, what a user wants is good software, softwares in which he need not be a geek to solve the problem. And surely as of now, I do not see open source work to give any good  reply to this need. You may say that Gutsy is a solution, or fedora 8 is awesome, and these distros solves most of the problems. But don’t you think you have been giving these arguments for last 20 years? When fedora 5 came, everyone said the same. When fedora 6 came same. And same goes with Ubuntu.

In my post about google products, I had shown my wish to have a desktop application for calendar which should sync it’s data with an online server so that I will not have to open browser to see calendar, and I will be able to see calendar even if I do not have my laptop with me.

Now, in software engineering course, we are asked to make a software using different software engineering techniques. And I could persuade my project partners to work on this dream calendar. Mainly the calendar will have following properties :

1. API for making desktop application and web application. First release will have API for perl only. (will serve both desktop and web application )
2. All normal calendar things
3. The software will be under GPL.
4. Others will be able to change your calendar, if you have given them permission.
5. others will be able to send you a request to add an entry in your schedule, like your friend may want you to attend a meeting, (s)he can put an entry for that in your calendar, but you have to accept that request so it finally appear in your schedule.
6. We are trying to understand how iCal works, once we understand that, we will try to include iCal as well, so that you could use current softwares which supports iCal. (iCal is RFC standard for calendars, that means I can freely use it. right?)
7. As of now, if iCal doesn’t make sense, we will have our own thing, for now we are calling it oCal.
8. I will run this server on my web server, so if you others wouldn’t have a server to sync their data, they should be able to do that.
9. We are thinking of including some plugin system as well, so users could modify the calendar functionalities, though we are looking at how different plugin systems works
10. Current status of the project can be seen at http://rohitj.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=software_engineering_project

If you think you want a particular feature in the calendar, let me know. We want to know what users want.

So, these guys they have collected some logos of some free softwares. Checkout http://raro.oreto.inf-cr.uclm.es/apps/stickers/ . It’s a cool collection. Right now, on my laptop I have got 5 stickers.

1. Some warning label.
2. Laptop Hardware Config.
3. Graphics by ATI
4. Intel Inside
5. Designed for MS Windows XP

Of course the fifth one makes my laptop look dirty. . I want to remove it, but I am afraid my laptop’s beauty will go down with the mark that this sticker will leave. But these guys have given ‘us’ a solution. We plan to get these stickers printed. And then we will be able to remove the existing stickers and place these free software stickers on  the same place. It will be so cool.

Those who want such stickers, leave a comment here. And wait for some time. ( Search for a press is going)