On2Biz virtual development team, thanks to open source
December 6, 2006 – 12:06 amI recently met someone who sells Microsoft CRM to companies in the Middle East. When I demonstrated On2Biz to him, he was really impressed with how much we have achieved. But he raised one important question about On2Biz - how can you compete with the likes of Microsoft with their huge development team, marketing and sales channel and deep pockets?
Here is the first part of the answer - the development resources that are behind On2Biz are probably as big as the development team of any large product development company, thanks to the open source applications that On2Biz is based on.
On2Biz uses the following major open source components. If you combine the total number of developers who continuously support and upgrade these applications, I would venture to guess that the number would be in thousands!
- Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl (LAMP) - is the server framework. All our development computers also run on Linux. There is no doubt about the stability of this platform any more, which is evident from the wide spread support from industry bigwigs for this platform
- Berkley DB - the object database that we use to store native XML objects. The fact that Oracle recently bought Berkley DB shows the kind of traction BDB has. Remains to be seen whether it will remain open source for long, though.
- Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) - several hundreds of modules from CPAN have saved us several man years of development, and continue to provide regular updates at no cost.
- Firefox / Mozilla - the main browser that is supported by On2Biz (we are planning to support IE in the near future, but right now prefer to spend time developing the core features rather than waste time creating work arounds to handle browser vagaries. Fortunately, our users are not complaining too much)
- jQuery - poetry in javascript originally coded by John Resig, master of Javascript, and now supported by several other developers. jQuery forms the core of the On2Biz interface, with several plugins that add further value thanks to their respective authors.
- Wordpress - this site runs on Wordpress, the coolest blog software there is. The blog helps to keep the entire On2Biz community in the loop, as well as keeps prospective users informed about the service. This would otherwise have taken a whole marketing and customer support team.
- Subversion (SVN) - this is a version management system that helps us to keep track of all development changes we make to the entire code base. Since we use an iterative development process, tracking changes and the ability to revert back to any previous version is extremely important. Subversion also has a huge development team supporting it.
We are using several more open source applications as part of our development process. There are tools like Inkscape, GIMP and Open Office that we use for designing the interface and documentation, libraries like Open Clipart, and public domain graphics by generous souls like Mark James which give us access to a huge virtual design team.
As you can see, using open source resources and platforms has effectively provided us with a virtual development team consisting of hundreds of programmers and designers which would otherwise have costs millions of dollars. And the fact that none of these developers actually are employed by us ensures that they will never leave :-), hence its a very stable work force!
And then there are our users! Most of On2Biz features planning and quality control is done by the users! We have a loyal set of users who tirelessly use the application, test it, give us feedback and suggestions that keeps On2Biz functioning smoothly and growing in value for everyone.