GroupServer: The Open Source Software Behind OnlineGroups.Net

Finally this week (well, last week, this post and the release announcement have only just caught up) OnlineGroups.Net produced a new alpha release of GroupServer 1.0 entitled “Cream Freeze at the Beach”. Why did we do it? Or rather, why are we continuing to do it?

Was it our love for Open Source Software (OSS), like Linux (ok, you caught me, that was Ubuntu), Python, Apache, Zope or one of thousands of other OSS projects? Well, yes we love them, but that wasn’t the reason.

Was it because we wanted to jump on the bandwagon with major vendors who are slowly discovering that OSS is something that the market is demanding (well I had to throw something controversial in there didn’t I)? Well, no, we’ve been releasing OSS for several years now and using it in the most critical parts of our business for many years before that.

One of the big reasons is the community, and community is something our software is all about. Whether it’s a community of developers learning about the software, a community of accountants learning best practice, or an actual community interacting with one another about local politics, online communities are something we know something about. It seems somewhat natural that we should have a community surrounding the software that powers our communities (does that make it a meta-community?)

It’s also for the word-of-mouth advertising, something we really do love (because Advertising leads to Revenue, and Revenue leads to Beer). We know that people enjoy the software, they’ve told us. We know that people tell other people to check out GroupServer, because they’ve told us that too. We also know that not everyone will want to run their own installation of GroupServer, and that’s why we built OnlineGroups.Net. Hell, even if you do want to run your own installation of GroupServer, we’d still encourage you to try OnlineGroups.Net — we do all the hard work of managing the servers, and keeping things working.

Finally, it’s for the contributions. When OnlineGroups.Net improves GroupServer, we improve the software for you to use yourself, and for us to use with OnlineGroups.Net. When a developer outside of OnlineGroups.Net improves GroupServer (or a non-developer contributes documentation, or ideas, or a new skin, or …) all our customers benefit from the improvements (and thus, love us even more), and the community of people using GroupServer also benefit.

For more information about the new release of GroupServer, see the announcement. Or if you’re really impatient, just download it.