Progress report for Open Source Initiative

Wow it's been 3 months since we made the announcement that Digital Positions was going to open source our Content Management System i3SiteTools. So where are we in the journey? What's been done? And the most important question when will we see some code and get to play with it?

Well we've actually made a lot of progress behind the scenes and are inching our way to launching it with each passing day. As Ben pointed out in an earlier post we have spent an incredible amount of time, energy and sanity trying to come up with a new name. We think we've got one but we've got to get some "branding work" done before I'm allowed to even drop hints. As with any name I'm sure there will be people who love it, and those who don't but that's the great thing about the product. We can call it one thing but then you can download it make a few tweaks and slap a new name on it for your clientele.

Besides trying to re-name i3SiteTools we've also been pouring over open source licenses trying to figure out which one we wanted to go with. We've got three license right now in the running; The Common Development and Distribution License, The Common Public License, and The Apache License Version 2.0. If you've got any insight to any of these we'd love to hear from you, in particular we're interested in what you like / don't like about a particular license or how one license might be more problematic for you and your usage of i3SiteTools.

Now we aren't just dealing with the paper side of the house, we've also had our nose down in the code. Besides trying our best to clean it up and provide comments we've also been adding some great new features which we think will be welcomed by a lot of developers. One of the hiccups we've been trying to overcome is to ensure that i3SiteTools will run on both dedicated hardware as well as shared hosting. For most of our clients they are either hosted on our infrastructure or they purchase their own hardware to run everything on. We've actually only deployed i3SiteTools on one clients shared hosting plan and we've learned a lot from that one installation. I'm pretty confident that when we do launch shared hosting will not be a problem thanks to the changes we are making now.

One thing we've also decided is to not make our "beta" period so formal, so many of you who are interested but not in the Atlanta area will be able to get your hands on it when it's ready. The initial beta will require a bit of setup on your part but we hope to make it something you can have up and running quickly without too many headaches. The final product will all be done via a web based installer to ensure that things go smoothly for all.

OK that's enough from me for now. If you've got questions or thoughts post em here as comments or request access to our Google Group.