Nov
14
Opening the source at Big in Japan!
The Big in Japan team is growing and our mission is becoming clear. This morning while I was driving to work I was considering how much time we should invest in the free feed tools we built over the past year including FeedVault, PodServe, FrankenFeed, elfURL, InstantFeed, QwikPing and SocialMail. They need a lot of work to be relevant, but we are super busy working with our paying social media clients. Do we have the time to support a suite of tools that were very hot a year ago, but cooling off by the day?
We learned quite a bit about development, rss, social media, web 2.0 and ruby on rails while developing them. We learned even more about how hard it is to keep web services relevant. We are still using custom versions (i.e. mash-ups) of the tools to support our own clients.
So here is our proposal (instead of selling them on ebay). We will open up the source code for each tool (with the exception of PodServe for now) using the GPL just as we did for SimpleTicket. What do we ask in return? That anyone using the tools (i.e. building something from our initial work) contribute that work back into the SVN for that tool (FYI – the license requires it). If you don’t want to, or can’t contribute your modifcations back just let us know and we will sell you a modified license. The name Big in Japan is the property of our company as are the trade names associated with each tool. Oh, and we will keep them running as hosted services as well (don’t email us ~ your data is safe).
Check back soon for links to the SVN for each tool. Hope you enjoy taking a look at the code…
[...] In Japan, a company based out of Dallas, Texas, announced yesterday that they’re open sourcing code for several of their social media web tools. You may have heard [...]
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