On Dec 11, 2006, at 10:32 AM, Ean Schuessler wrote:
On Thursday 07 December 2006 23:08, David E Jones wrote:
I finally listened to this today as I was driving.
In general this was a great interview, hopefully we'll have some new
johns interested in the project... ;)
One little correction about the history: there wasn't actually a
company that initially funded OFBiz. It is true that I was involved
in a couple of companies that failed and that were trying to do
similar things to what OFBiz offered, but it was only after they went
belly-up that I got OFBiz going. So, basically Andy and I worked on
this as we could for about a year, then tried both working for a
company that wanted to invest in OFBiz and become a premier service
provider but that company was not well run so Andy and I jumped ship
after about 6 months there, and that is when we were able to start
doing consulting full time based on OFBiz. So, it took about 18
months to get OFBiz to the point where were could do consulting full
time based on it.
Whoops! My mistake. I'll make sure to correct it in the future.
I thought the system had its roots in a homebuilding startup or
something. I
knew Partner Homes had done some work with the system but I thought
there had
been a business that existed before that. It has been some time
since I was
out in Utah.
Am I completely inventing the idea that OFBiz didn't start as an
Open Source
project? I thought it was originally proprietary.
Actually, yes, it did start out from line 1 as an open source project
and never was a proprietary effort that turned open source.
If forgot that you're aware of more of the history of OFBiz from the
Stephen Loosli side of things. Stephen was the CEO of the company I
worked for just before starting OFBiz and it was when they ran out of
money that I decided if I was going to work for free, it might as
well be on an open source project. There was a bunch of stuff
developed in that company, but using it as a basis for an open source
project wasn't an option because other owners of the company wanted
to (and did) derive some profit from it to recover some of their
investment. They actually sort of open sourced that at one point, but
with a dual license model for marketing reasons, not to create a real
community project around it.
So basically OFBiz was an independent effort from the beginning. It
was never owned or sponsored by any company, except the various
contributors over time who never had any "ownership" of it, but
rather just participated in the community. This is even true of
Undersun Consulting which sponsored (along with Contegix) some of the
infrastructure for OFBiz: it never owned any of OFBiz. In the
beginning in 2001 it was just Andy and I running up our phone bills
and working on a few paid projects here and there where we tried to
get our clients to use OFBiz. There were certainly lots of places we
got ideas, and The Data Model Resource Books were a big part of that,
but the code was "community driven" open source from day and line 1.
-David
