(long posting alert)...
Right. I understand your point too. About the abrupt termination, well there was no other easy way. I suppose in retrospect, things could have been done more smoothly. I am not sure how exactly, but I see your point.
As I stated in another e-mail, starting a "business/vertical" application as open source is a bad idea. Its easy to build a community when its a utility, a game, a technical app, a database engine etc. CRM, ATS, healthcare, finance type applications are not good candidates for open source projects. I am sure someone could argue with me here and give me examples of successful o/s project in the above fields. Trust me, I have studied each and every one in great detail. I have been using o/s for 17 years. I have released my own code in o/s many times before.
Take the example of SugarCRM. Yes it has a thriving o/s community. But if you look closely you will find 28M in financing from Kliener Perkins (the guys who funded netscape, amazon, yahoo). After 4 years of being "open source" SugarCRM still doesnt allow code from outside. They have a tight control over the direction of the project, and I can totally understand why (feature creeps, usability etc)
Other times business when o/s apps have been successful has been is when some lone founder (who happens to be a domain expert) writes an app and then slowly over a long period of time releases it under GPL. Wordpress is one good example. In those cases, The author almost always has a day job and doesnt have to fund a team of developers.
CATS business model was difficult to begin with. We got a lot of criticism from the likes of the "Open Software Foundation" for CPL not being a true open source license. We were getting over a 100 e-mails, instant chat requests, calls a day. When we were not able to answer, people were getting really angry for not helping them (for free..mind you).
I posted a question " Making a Living Building Open Source Software?"
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/27/1934249
on slashdot back in Jan 2006. Hundreds of replies/suggestions from technical users, very much like this forum here. I read each one of them and we applied most of suggestions, but none worked. We just couldnt make $$$ from the o/s project, while our costs had grown up to $20k/month when we stopped open source.
Yes my team and I have been frustrated and saddened by how things turned out. I was sincerely hoping for CATS to be a successful o/s project and pave the way for others. Somethings/ideas while great in theory are never meant to see the light of the day. I hope someone proves me wrong, and does indeed invent/create a sustainable model for a BUSINESS type o/s application. I know a lot of people are trying and I am watching the space carefully.
In the meantime, my challenge is to come up with enough money to pay for the current team expenses using the hosted model.
Finally, I am a recruiter. I run a recruitment company with 6-8 recruiters. I have called pretty much every ATS vendor and reviewed the software and the pricing. I know the fee structures involved in the recruiting business. I find it intellectually dishonest, when a recruiter charges $15,000 in placement fee (say 1 placement a month) and then cringes on the thought of paying me $29/month for providing a professionally hosted application. My datacenter infrastructure alone was over $25,000 to build.
I like the enthusiasm of some of the people here. I admire it. I am sure they are all sincere. My hats off to all of them. I wish I could find a happy medium and support this community. My problem was not with the CATS enthusiasts. My problem was with over 90% of CATS users who were running successful recruiting companies but wouldnt pay a penny and yet wanted support from my team for free. Some of you who will be reading this know, I gave over 20-30 professional licenses at no cost to some of our "advanced" users on the forums. This was our token of appreciation. We helped whenever we could. I would be more then happy to help again. I would be more then happy to give free professional accounts to the same advanced users/beta testers on our hosted platform (quid pro quo). I will talk to my team members and see what we could come up with.
I will be glad to participate in this forum when time permits, but I am not sure, if I will have the time for it. I will try to be a lurker at least
I am always available on phone. Anyone is welcome to call and chat!
Asim
952-232-0880 x101
asim@catsone.com