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April 13, 2005
A free open source stack?
With a little wistfulness I'm looking at the beginning of my OSOCO project I started nearly three years ago. This is the initial description:
OSOCO is a two-fold project consisting of a documentation section and a software section.
The documentation section is a guide to open source projects or a directory for OS projects. It will contain information about various OS projects and give an overview. This will help others in selection the right OS software for their needs. The main sections will be versioning, project management, mail server, web server, IDEs etc.
The idea behind the software section is to build a complete software development suite on OS projects. This will developers enable to quick start an open source software development by simply installing an operating system (linux) and OSOCO and everything is ready.
I can currently imagine, to "bundle" the Apache Web Server, Subversion as the versioning system, James as the mail server, Maven or Centipede as Project Managament, Cocoon for Documentation and Presentation and Eclipse as IDE. But I don't plan to simply put these different projects into CVS of OSOCO and that's it. Instead I want to build something that will fetch these different projects from the various sources, glue them together, configure them in an easy way and establish a development suite.
Sounds familiar? Sigh, yes, back in 2002 I had the nice idea of building a - tara - open source stack (gosh, it's really already three years since then). But due to lack of time I never got anywhere; even worse at that time people laughed about the idea and kept telling "noone needs this - it's a waste of time".
Well, now in 2005 things seem to have changed. There are so many companies out there providing stacks on different levels. So, if companies can base their business model on this, what was wrong with my idea? Perhaps that I wanted to create the stack as an open source project with no company you could pay behind it? Hmm. Or is it because today everyone is using open source but still wants to sue someone if bad things happen? And back in 2002 open source was just the playground for some nerds? Hmm. Ok, seriously, in the end I was not able to attract people and create a community to establish a real project - it's that simple.
But what about today? Still noone interested? I'm sure there must be some VCs out there eager to invest into this idea...
Posted by cziegeler at April 13, 2005 07:13 PM