One of our perpetual yet inspiring challenges is to make a living while doing open source. When we founded Outerthought, our idea was to provide our technical skills to the community-at-large, by teaching and coding the technology we've grown attached to over the years: Java and XML. Three years later and a little bit wiser, we now understand that endurance in such an endeavor only comes with a sustainable business model. Hence, we've grown increasingly less shy to ask companies, who require our skills or the products we support, for sponsorship of our activities through standard commercial projects. As Ted described very eloquently, our aim is to help grow the software commons by running a fat-free organization, actively seeking customers who want to support our open source efforts. It's a balancing act, and one will never appreciate the effort required for even a mild success, unless he or she happened to be in the same boat as we have been in now for the past three years. But we love every minute of it.
Despite mailing lists and other virtual hangouts, open source developers can still feel a bit isolated from the "real world", if only because they don't know who is using their stuff, and for what purposes. On a local scale, it is still quite feasible to drive around and preach your open source chant, trying to "sell" your product or at least the services you are providing around it, but on a global scale, especially for small-entities-by-design as ours, we very much depend on word-of-mouth and grassroots marketing. Obviously, the same is true for users of open source products: sometimes they don't have the slightest idea who else is interested in or using the same product as they do, and they might feel insecure about their choice until somebody else stands up and tells them they are happy users as well.
In an experiment to see how far I can stretch this meme of mutual comforting, and for our own learning as well, I did some server log analysis of the downloads of our open source CMS Daisy over the past three months (15/Oct 2004 to 15/Jan 2005). Well aware of our abysmal marketing, and our non-flashy and buzzword-incompliant website, we evidently require people to make up their own mind before downloading Daisy, so I wasn't holding my breath. Over the period of three months however, we see as many as 3300 downloads, which puts us on track to reach about 15.000 downloads in Daisy's first year. I suspect the download momentum doesn't scale linearly, but that remains to be see, and word-of-mouth sure is pretty important here. Power laws will apply and all that.
Now onto the who: who has been downloading Daisy over this short period? Well, that analysis brought a big smile to my face, knowing several very big companies have spent at least some time to take a brief look at Daisy. As I said, my intention is to see how far I can stretch the "open source everything, including accounts and server logs" meme, so here's the list of companies and institutions who downloaded Daisy, caveat gethostbyaddr lookup errors and eventual interpretation mistakes on my behalf. I'd love to see this confirmed by the effective downloaders somehow, though that might be one stretch too far. On with the list:
- IBM US, UK and Germany
- EDS
- the Brazilian government
- July Systems (Mobile Data Systems)
- Ergon Informatik AG (consulting shop in Switzerland)
- Farnell (distributor of electronic components)
- Hewitt (HR Outsourcing)
- Oracle
- Software AG
- Kreditwerk Hamburg - Schwäbisch Hall AG (IT solutions for banking)
- United States Joint Forces Command
- VRT (the Flemish Radio & Television station)
- Deutche Börse (German stock exchange)
- Sun Microsystems
- De Persgroep (Belgian publisher)
- Bear Stearns (investment bank, broker)
- Commerzbank (german bank)
- Swift (worldwide money exchange)
- Ricoh (copiers and more)
- Pfizer (pharmaceutical company)
- DHL
- Limited Brands (owns Victoria's Secret and more)
- BlastRadius (XML software vendor)
- Royal Bank of Canada
- Pearson Plc (educational publisher, FT.com, Penguin books)
- Dupont (chemicals)
- Nokia
- SAS Institute (statistical software)
- FDA (the US federal drug agency)
If you downloaded Daisy and are not in this list, don't worry, and send me a note if you want to be in. If you downloaded Daisy and want your company name removed from this list, send me a note as well. Obviously this list doesn't provide any endorsement for Daisy from any of the above companies. But my gut tells me that, if only 5% of these companies become really interested in Daisy and would be willing to support continued development, Daisy's future is going to be very, very bright. I know how much vendors of proprietary software would want to give for a list with leads like this. Obviously, I only have IP addresses - no phone numbers to call to. :-)
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Great post, Steven. I sincerely hope Daisy will make your dream of an sustainable OSS-driven company come true.