While perhaps no indication of what these companies are buying, it's still interesting to discover that Bank of America, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, IBM, Siemens, Toshiba, Honeywell, and Nortel have downloaded and installed Projity's OpenProj, an open-source replacement for Microsoft Project.
They're not alone. As Projity CEO Marc O'Brien recently told Linux.com's Tina Gasperson, 500,000 individuals have downloaded OpenProj to date.
Perhaps most intriguing in all of this is that Projity knows which companies have downloaded and installed its software, since it can't get that information from Sourceforge, from which individuals download the software. (It could, of course, be the case that each of the companies noted above is a paying customer, but since several of these are unlikely to serve as public references....) I'm guessing that Projity has some sort of a "call home" feature in its project, or perhaps a simple web bug that registers with Projity each time a page is refreshed.
If the latter, it becomes doubly interesting when you consider Projity's license: CPAL. In this case, CPAL might prohibit users from removing the very web bug that Projity uses to track their use of the software.
Marc or someone else care to comment on how the tracking is managed? I'm sure a range of open-source companies would love to learn who is using their software, provided it doesn't abrogate a user's control of their privacy.
UPDATE: Marc O'Brien, CEO of Projity, emailed me to clarify the privacy issues I raised above:
I was disappointed you choose to raise issues that are erroneous and really counter productive for the open source success of OpenProj. ALL companies mentioned and all companies that we know are using OpenProj and Project-ON-Demand have provided us with their contact information. We do not know of ANY company using OpenProj or Project-ON-Demand who has not proactively given us their contact information.
Thanks for the clarification, Marc, and congratulations on getting these exceptional customers. That says a great deal about the quality of the software.
There were a slew of new open-source companies launched (or still getting first looks) at last week's Open Source Business Conference. A few sites (Socialized Software and ZDNet, to name two of them)have been pointing to some of the more promising ones.
Here are a few to watch:
- Acquia - Drupal-based social/web content management company
- Ringside Networks - Social networking platform/application server
- Loopfuse - Marketing automation (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Loopfuse)
- Projity - Microsoft Project competitor
And more. Check out the sites above to see who else caught the eye. Interestingly, JBoss executives sit on the management teams of several of them. As the market grows, there will be more cross-breeding between commercial open-source projects. This is a Very Good Thing.
It will be a few years, but I can't wait until Zimbra and MySQL have loosed their golden handcuffs so that they can start new companies, too. That's how the open-source business market will be enriched and grow.
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