MindTouch closes a banner year
While it's true that open-source companies, in general, are starting from a small base of revenue and adoption, it's equally true that the real measure of any company is growth. If it's good, it will grow.
Hence, it's great to see MindTouch, a commercial open-source collaboration company, booming:
- Over 200,000 active installs - 100 percent increase
- Installs on all major Linux distributions - 600 percent increase
- More than 3,000 registered members at the developer community - 30 percent increase
- Translated into 16 languages - 500 percent increase
Impressive, but perhaps doubly so when you consider the nature of its customer base: Federal Express, Microsoft (I guess Sharepoint wasn't good enough for them ;-), United States Environmental Protection Agency (saving paper by collaborating online), and the City of Los Angeles, to name but a few.
As an advisor to MindTouch, I've been impressed by the quality of the product and the community uptake of a commercial open-source project. That's no small feat. It tends to be much easier to get community input as a community project - the more successful the company, the less involved the community. We'll see if MindTouch can break that cycle.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
