Posted by Eugenio on 9 Sep 2010
Hi folks,
yes, I know, long time since the last post and almost three years since the last DaDaBIK release :(
I haven't had enough time for DaDaBIK in the last period and, to be honest, I also haven't had enough reasons to spend my nights and my spare time in coding and testing as I did before.
It's hard to believe but the next year DaDaBIK will turn ten. Ten years! First public release on Sourceforge: November 2001. I can't imagine how many bugs that version contained :))
Many many times during this “sabbathic” period I tried to decide something about the future of DaDaBIK but I didn't manage to do it.
But...after nine years from the first release, almost three years from the last release and more than two years of “silence” I still get e-mail from people who want to thank me, people still download DaDaBIK, people still write on the forum, people still use DaDaBIK: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22powered+by%3A+dadabik%22&btnG=Google+Search
so now I'm sure that DaDaBIK is not dead and I WANT TO KEEP IT ALIVE because maybe was one of the most useful things I made.
I used to work as a consultant for a software house but some months ago I decided to quit my job and to dedicate the next year almost entirely to scientific research: I'm doing a PhD on recommender systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recommender_system) and I have to work hard on it now; I won't have so much spare time but I really want to take some time for DaDaBIK...even because I really need some coding activity :)
But this time I really need your support; DaDaBIK is still a GPL software but, after hundreds of hours spent on it for free, now I really would like to have some economic return for the future work. If you think DaDaBIK is useful, I ask you to donate some money to the project; even a few euros/dollars is enough if a lot of people will do it. If you also use DaDaBIK for your business and make money with it, you should perceive the donation as the MOST NORMAL THING TO DO.
Chris Anderson predicted that "free is the future of business"; I instead hope the future will be: users paying small fees (would be great if voluntarily) for good services/software, and I want to experiment this with DaDaBIK.
I still don't know if I will implement a real business model for DaDaBIK, by now I would like to put more emphasis on free donations and see what happens, see if the community will respond to my appeal; then maybe I will try a more structured approach (see for example how the ardour project gets money http://ardour.org/development) or a donation-per-feature approach. I also thought about double licensing and selling a commercial version of DaDaBIK, what do you think? Will someone be interested in paying for a commercial/premium version of DaDaBIK? DON'T WORRY, my ideas is too always keep a GPL version available.
I don't know exactly where to start; the code is a bit old-fashion now but it's clean and it works so for the moment I think it wouldn't be so useful to rewrite DaDaBIK from scratch using some modern paradigm. Maybe it would be better to start implementing the next steps of the road map or including some of the custom features that users added to DaDaBIK during these years.
The Web site too would need an update, but maybe at the moment just for the fourm: the forum system (phorum) is very old and now there are many open source systems with a lot of interesting features like the trust level of each user. What do you thing about this? Any suggestions? I think the second issue in order of importance would be adding a real blog system to the site instead of this home-made announcement system.
Last but not least: I (we) really have to say a big “thank you!” to Debbie, who during these years took care of the support forum, even during my virtual absence. Debbie YOU ARE GREAT!
Ok, long post but many things to say after so long time. Now I would like to read your comment, please let me know what you think.
Ciao,
Eugenio
DaDaBIK®