Assembla Blog

Posted by andy@assembla.com Sat, 01 Apr 2006 20:19:00 GMT

Different licenses serve different purposes. Free Software brings forth user innovation. Non-free software brings forth investment. Thankfully, there are licenses in between that can bring forth both, maximizing our ability to deliver great innovations.

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Posted by andy@assembla.com Wed, 29 Mar 2006 22:57:00 GMT

Pito Salas invited me to a “Geek Dinner”, which I attended tonight. It was organized by Pito and blogger Adam Green, and populated by RSS and blogging geeks. I pitched the Software Professional network and came away with some positives:

• Two different guys came up to me and said, essentially, that they manage multiple groups of unruly open source developers, and they will try our system. Mental note – a couple of guys asked about time tracking and billing. I got the same question at the Ruby Users Group meeting.

• I learned more from Dan Bricklin about the wiki/spreadsheet he has been working on. Once I started thinking about how it lives out in data space, and can pull data and catch data from other servers, I started thinking it will be big. Definitely worth adding as a tool. It will be useful for management reporting and for securities research.

• Adam Green said “my last company (Andover.net at the height of the craziness in 99) was sold to Sourceforge. How does this competeâ€?. I explained what we were doing and why I thought we would roll right over VA Software, and he agreed.

I ended up giving an impassioned speech about what a great business software suddenly is, with costs down, demand up, and innovation flourishing. Maybe that one beer wasn’t such a great idea on four hours of sleep. More on that later.

Posted by andy Fri, 17 Feb 2006 12:17:00 GMT

We have finally announced the new strategy and releases for Project.net, at OSBC on February 14. Over the next few months we will release open source, hosted on-demand, and enterprise packages based on this product. We picked up some nice articles in the press.

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Posted by andy Mon, 13 Feb 2006 14:16:00 GMT

I have moved my own development mostly to dynamic languages Ruby and Python, and I can see that these languages have had a big jump in popularity over the past year. This is not a fad. It is a very real and permanent response to increasing developer productivity.

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Posted by andy Mon, 21 Nov 2005 16:53:00 GMT

How can we design a business that will be it’s competitor’s worst nightmare, if not unbeatable, at least unbreakable. Put another way, how can you design a business that would be your worst nightmare if it became a competitor?

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Posted by andy Tue, 18 Oct 2005 15:40:00 GMT

The GOSCON event was a great success, with about 200 attendees, about twice the expected turnout. Below are some observations that might be relevant for for Massachusetts. Linda Hamel, Massachusetts ITD general counsel, was a star of the show. There is a consensus that Massachusetts has set the …

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Posted by andy Tue, 27 Sep 2005 20:49:00 GMT

Sakai is a Learning Management System that provides features for students to interact with their professors and their universities on the Web. Why is Sakai important?

• It’s the best example that we have seen of a community coming together to build an industry-specific application.
• The community has generated real …

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Posted by andy Fri, 23 Sep 2005 13:50:00 GMT

I have recently spoken with a number of enterprise software companies about a raft of strategies for growing their businesses. The market for enterprise software (including hosted apps) is improving after a tough half-decade, but it still isn’t comfortable for vendors. Buyers still don’t like buying big systems because adoption …

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Posted by andy Sun, 18 Sep 2005 20:36:00 GMT

I went to the “alt.wheels” show today which had the motto “Creating a sustainable transportation vision for the 21st century”. I got some geek thrills out of looking at the engineering in new types of cars. I also came away very concerned about the lack of commitment that …

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Posted by andy Tue, 23 Aug 2005 14:09:00 GMT

Houston, we have a problem. Innovation in aerospace stalled out and started losing altitude around 1970. Instead of jet packs and vacations on Mars, we have foam falling off the 30-year old space shuttle. Our life today isn’t anything like the twenty-first century life we imagined in …

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