asimbaig wrote:skwdenyer wrote:I've just been browsing the catsone site in a bit more detail, and looked at the release notes for 0.9.0 and 0.9.1. There are quite a few things on there that I know we fixed or developed in-house and which (I believe) we posted the fixes / enhancements for onto the catsone forums or directly to the Cognizo guys.
In fact the whole history of CATS seems to be littered with the OS community participants identifying bugs, fixing them, suggesting and discussing changes, and so on, only for them to get wrapped up into the code and taken back into closed source. I do think, on that view, it is just a little bit rich of Cognizo to claim they got nothing back. And in fact the Professional On-Site edition would have been something we'd have been interested in, had it now been available. But hey-ho, sometimes even the best-intentioned of people get lost seeing the value they have...
NO you are wrong. Completely wrong.
We always made sure we didn't incorporate any code from any one without signing an ICL (Individual Contribution License) Agreement. Please get your facts straight. Everyone submits bugs, even for commercial software, even to Microsoft. The bugs rarely came with a solution. I know it because I read every post over the last 3 years. We fixed or tried to fix every bug ourselves. Its possible that someone suggested some obvious code change. We reciprocated by giving them software for free.....30,000 copies used in 120 countries. What else do we give????
Hi there. I'm sorry that I seem to have caught a nerve. For the record I did NOT set out to suggest that you were somehow exploiting others' code contributions. Anybody who contributed code had to sign an ICL, and that was very obvious. However - genuinely - are you saying that none of the discussion and suggestions on the forums were useful in terms of refining the offering? And how much of the community involvement would have come without the OS element? It seemed pretty clear when the code was opened that Cognizo was doing this to widen the audience for CATS. That seems to have worked, you now have lots of users, and now - it seems, but see below - that the OS element is no longer needed for traffic generation.
The software world is littered with companies who opened the code for a while, got lots of people excited, didn't really get the community involved with code development, but nonetheless got excellent testing and feedback from OS users, and then closed the source or fell back to SAAS once the code was mature. On the face of it CATS is in this camp, which is a shame. The CATS licence added to that feeling. Hence I suspect most of your OS users would just view it as free (as in beer) software. This is a common problem with what I call "sorta open source" companies. The source may be open, but if the development programme isn't and the IP in contributions goes to a private company to close as they see fit, you only get a "sorta open source community" and don't win.
It is hard to interpret the bare notice on the website or the wholesale dumping of the forums and the associated community as anything positive. Had your professional on-site edition been available, I'd have bought it, just as I'm about to buy a whole bundle of licences for Zimbra having used it in production in OS form for a while now. For the record, I can't use the hosted version as it would be illegal under UK law. The same is true for (probably) most of your UK and EU users (although they may simply ignore that aspect of the UK Data Protection Act or corresponding legislation enacting the provisions of the EU Data Protection Directive - their choice).
The real shame of this? The recruitment world is equally littered with, frankly, crap software. CATS is a breath of fresh air. But I believe Zimbra provides a model to follow to crack this market. Open source still is a great approach, although I note that you've now changed your marketing.
In the OS world, splitting the OS product off into a separate sub-brand, with a separate website, the forums, and so on and a "no support, sorry" policy would have been an interesting approach. To dump a community wholesale seems, frankly, to reinforce the belief - however unfounded - that Cognizo wasn't really trying to make OS work as a collaborative concept so much as a marketing tool. For that, at one level, I'm very grateful - we've got a great codebase to build on.
asimbaig wrote:" it is just a little bit rich of Cognizo to claim they got nothing back" <--- I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on CATS. I cant go in to details but suffice to say, paying a team of programmers for 3 years, all I ever got was a check for $200 from Jos Bodewes in Summer of 2007. My cost to run CATS team was over $20,000/month!
We were getting upwards of 100 emails, calls, instant chat requests, and forum posts for features and help. It was impossible to continue.
Yes, when I say, I did'nt get anything back from the community, thats exactly what it means.
I understand the difficulties of running an OS initiative. I never claimed it was easy. However, with respect, (and clearly I'm viewing it from the outside) your business model didn't seem to be directed towards actually making any money from OS. Only at the last was there a professional on-site edition (bear in mind that precious few in, say, the UK - where I am - could legally use your US-hosted edition). I certainly didn't see any evidence of a consulting offering, a (paid) support operation for the OS community, and so on. Now I see that your site promotes a "one size fits all", "no consulting fees" approach. OK, that's fine. But are you suggesting that the OS approach got you no traffic and no sales? All of a sudden CATS is no longer the OS ATS, it is the world's most popular ATS. But clearly that happened in spite of the OS approach, not because of it?
I run several businesses. I have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on new businesses. I do it in the expectation of a return. I imagine you do, too. You clearly get a return from your hosted edition, you might (if you'd done it enough) have got a return from a professional on-site edition. History suggests that a properly-orchestrated OS effort can result in plenty of return, too. However you've firmly nailed your colours to the SAAS mast. OK, that's fine, too. And you seem to have a lot of users. If even 10% of those 15k recruiters are paying you $29/month then you're grossing $45k/month, or $540k/year. That's a good business, and you're making your money back. You obviously believe, with hindsight, that the OS approach brought you none of your paying customers. That's your perogative.
I had developers working on our CATS implementation. Since there didn't seem to be a roadmap which we could engage with, nor a mechanism for contributing code in a collaborative manner, nor a guarantee that what was written today would still work tomorrow since successive versions broke work we'd done previously, we rather gave up on keeping tabs on the official effort. That was a shame. Since, for us, nothing earlier than 0.8.0 was really viable as a working (as opposed to proof-of-concept) system, we had to do that work. We ported all of our changes to 0.8.0, and then kept developing in-house. Due to licensing, we can't make any money from most of that investment unless we can "modularise" it. We were going to start doing that once CATS reached a (presumably stable) 1.0 release, but since there's no CATS community any longer and no on-site offering of any kind, we can't promote our modules to that market. In that regard, I guess dumping the OS stuff, the forums, the community looks like a smart move in terms of making sure nobody else can make any money from CATS, and stopping those of us who invested real money into developing for CATS don't have a platform from which to pass comment.
Perhaps this site can ignite the spark of widespread contribution? Who knows? I still can't buy seats on your hosted edition and operate legally, so I'll have to stick with my - heavily customised - OS CATS. And I doubt you're going to be offering a marketplace for third-party modules to be plugged into the live running (are you still running everyone on the same instance?) hosted version, so that's that.
asimbaig wrote: There are quite a few things on there that I know we fixed or developed in-house and which (I believe) we posted the fixes / enhancements for onto the catsone forums or directly to the Cognizo guys..
Really. which ones? We gave credit to everyone whenever it was due.
Asim
952-232-0880 x101
asim@catsone.com
I would have to look back at what the developers did - we haven't done any new work for about 6 months now. Certainly looking back at my development policy, it was that fixes to the codebase should be contributed back but I wasn't the review point for the code. I know I personally posted code early on in the work for, for example, allowing the order of custom fields to be changed, allowing the order of all fields to be changed, and so on. I didn't do it for recognition, I wouldn't really care if you picked it up or not, and in any case there wasn't a reliable roadmap to "plug it into." I did it in case anybody else would find it useful, and I would do so again.
The whole thing reminds me a little of a piece of UK-based software called Convea from 2002/3 or so. It was a fabulous exercise in DHTML scripting, delivering a fully-windowed interface with much of Outlook's functionality in a web solution years before Web 2.0, AJAX etc became buzzwords. It was an ASP solution. They tried to sell it as enterprise software, and didn't do so well. So they open-sourced it (except that you couldn't make money hosting it, any code contributions were owned by the publishers, and so on). Suddenly there was a community, lots of people eager to participate, and some very frazzled developers who couldn't cope with the support side because - to be frank - they hadn't thought through how to build and run an OS business, didn't have a mechanism for getting community developers to actually contribute, and so on. And no real companies wanted to contribute because of the licence conditions. So they pulled the source and published a very bitter post about how it just wasn't fair that people expected software for free. The last I heard they had sold it for a pittance and the new owner was trying to take on Outlook again.
My point is simple. I wish you luck with your SAAS model. It is a perfectly honourable business. I am frustrated by the whole OS thing only because CATS could have been one of THE great OS killer apps, but the business model didn't seem to be geared to actually making money from OS software, and hence, err, it seems it didn't.
- By utetasty