SQLFusion blogs

Zoli has an interesting post on the debate regarding SaaS vs Open Source.

It is clear to me that both works very well together.

Take the best of both world for the best return on investment.

I noticed that there is a new generation of Open Source software including ZenPhoto, Plogger, Lussumo Vanilla, Wordpress, Monket calendar, Photostack, Roundcube which follows a lot Defensive Design recipes.

Those applications take full advantage of Ajax to improve the user experience. Intuitive and simple seems to be the new rules in software development.

I am very impressed by what 37 signals do. Their influence is now everywhere in web based software. Directly or indirectly.

So thank you for taking software a step forward.

After Office Live it is Google's turn to offer a web site creation technology.

We anticipated the democratization of web site creation tools a couple of years ago and we invented a nice technology, called the Page Builder.

It is the first Ajax web site builder around.

It is currently sold to web hosting companies as a Do It Your Self web site solution under the Drag and Drop Site Creator brand. http://www.dragdropsitecreator.com/

Page Builder is already 70% open source. We are improving our documentation and preparing a full open source release very soon.

So please stay tuned...

We now have a lot of experience in site creation technology and I am waiting for my Beta access to Google Page Creator to see what they have and give you my 2 cts on it.

I do not see Google Page Creator or Office Live as a threat for our site creator, we are open source and we support / package / license to any web host or community builder who wants to offer site building features to their users.

This is definitely exciting.

I have spent 10 years following the open source and I am impressed by its ongoing evolution.

I remember that not long ago I had to wait quite while for KDE 1.0 to be released. Today I can hardly keep up with each new release of Ubuntu.

Open Source software was meant to be for developpers, geeks. Today open source software is synonymous with nice looking browsers, window based deskops and even enterprise applications.

In the last 6 months I have been working on Open Source Fusion project, where we select and make available open source applications for business.

In each web application category we want to offer and support at least 3 web applications. 2 years ago, when I searched for accounting, customer relationship management and accounting software I could hardly find any. Most applications in those categories were early projects, immature applications, not completely open source or unstable. Only a handful of applications were usable at the time.

Today, I cannot keep up with all the applications which are available. It is as if every day more application appears in the open source eco system than what I could track.

The growth rate is quite overwhelming. Open source software quality, size of the supporting community, usability and features are increasing at an amazing speed.

I am quite impressed. I have always thought it would happen one day, but who would not be impressed while facing a new "Cathedrale".

Indeed, today, I am seeing a "Cathedrale". The "Bazaard" is part of the past.

It is hard to understand how this can be possible. There are no more than 500,000 developers in the US today and the number didn't increase for the last 5 years. So where all this tremendous energy comes from?

I've seen something similar with blogs. The number of blogs has exploded in the past 3 years.

One of the answer could be - if put metaphorically - that there is an increasing "concentration of energies". Here is what I mean with this: the Internet has gathered and optimized the energy of millions of wanabe developers and journalists generating an unprecedented power of production. It is like those solar power plants that use milions of mirrors to reflect the sun light in one point to concentrate the energy offered by each ray.

Using this metaphor, a software developer contributing to an open source project, someone writing her blog and contributing content, a shopper writing a review on an e-commerce site or a business posting his products on e-bay: each of them is a ray of light. Altogether they form a tremendous creative power.

This result is a power of production never seen before.
We will see much more application, more diversity, the long tail of software will become a reality and the size and complexity of software is significantly increasing.

From the Bazaar will emerge Cathedrals of sizes never seen before.

Zoli has a great post on Open Source vs. big enterprise software vendors.

The post begins with a response to Shai Agassi's remarks about Open Source and continues by digging into what the real problem is and its potential solutions.

As Open Source moves toward enterprise applications, the value is impressive.
Open Source web-based applications mean no delivery or implementation costs and very low recurring fees.