CodePlex Foundation

September 13, 2009 — Aaron Fulkerson

I just announced some Interesting news at the work blog. I am now advising Microsoft on open source software strategy. Microsoft? Open source? Yes. I announced my joining the advisory board of the newly minted CodePlex Foundation that was created by Microsoft last week.

CodePlex Foundation: Microsoft, an Open Source Leader? | MindTouch, Inc Blog

Last week I joined the advisory board of the newly created CodePlex Foundation, which was forged in the bowels of Microsoft. Sounds scary doesn’t it?

CodePlex Foundation logoThe foundation, a 501.c6 non-profit, endeavors to increase participation in open source community projects. The intent is to provide a framework for commercial (proprietary) software companies to more easily contribute to open source projects. Specifically, the CodePlex Foundation wishes to help resolve concerns commonly shared among commercial software companies about contributions downstream; such as implied patents, copyright, licensing, etc.

Posted in Professional. Tags: , . No Comments »

Trent Reznor and Me

July 12, 2009 — Aaron Fulkerson

Being a nineteen year fan of Nine Inch Nails I was thoroughly pleased to read MindTouch, the company I CEO for, included in a C|Net article about Trent Reznor’s use of an Open Core business model.

Trent Reznor digs Open Core Business

The article cites a recent post I wrote at the MindTouch blog about the MindTouch Community. The Open Core business model works well in yielding exponential growth by building and engaging community. I write about this too in an article titled: “Open Source Magic Carpet Defies Recession”.

Posted in Business, Software. Tags: , , , , . No Comments »

Magic Carpet

July 7, 2009 — Aaron Fulkerson

I wrote this week at the MindTouch blog about the success of MindTouch and I provided a brief summary of how MindTouch is defying the recession.

MindTouch Growth by Quarter

Yes, this is the real revenue graph for MindTouch. I know what you’re thinking: What happened in Q2 2008? :-) Good question. I will get to this in a moment. There is a lot to learn from this graph like this. Beginning with MindTouch investing the first year solely in creating an install base and developer community. The first thing we launched was our developer community (July, 2006 at OSCON) and for the first year MindTouch did not bother trying to sell anything. We did manage to generate a surprising amount of revenue selling support without having a formal product in place and we began formally selling support subscriptions near the end of 2007. By the end of Q1 2008 MindTouch software was being distributed about 5,000 times a day and we turned our attention toward building the business. In Q2 2008 we began experimenting with a commercial edition.

…

via Open Source Magic Carpet Defies Recession | MindTouch, Inc Blog.

Posted in MindTouch, Professional. Tags: , , . 1 Comment »

Nominate MindTouch for Sourceforge.net Community Choice Award

May 6, 2009 — Aaron Fulkerson

After seeing how wonderful the Community Choice Awards (CCA) are when I visited the SourceForge office recently I’ve become obsessed. These are cute little robots with working LEDs, switches, sensors that make music…errr…noise. I must have one to go next to the 2009 Jolt Award for Best Enterprise App (watch the video) MindTouch won. My precious….These trophies are really really cool and very cute. Please nominate and vote for MindTouch rabidly. This year we’re going to pull out all the stops. We will remind you in the newsletter. On MindTouch.com, the blogs, the dev community. If it encourages voting I’ll even be willing to do something inane if the community wins a CCA for MindTouch. The community can feel free to select whatever inane act they deem appropriate. Please, bring the votes!

The finalists are determined by the number of nominations each project receives. You can vote as many times as you like. To hedge our bets please nominate for each of the following categories:

  1. Best project for the Enterprise
  2. Best commercial open source project
  3. Best project
  4. Most likely to change the way you do everything

PLEASE VOTE like rabid rabbits. Time is limited. Thanks. :-)

Posted in MindTouch. Tags: , , . 2 Comments »

On Open Source And Open Core

April 22, 2009 — Aaron Fulkerson

I wrote two blog posts at the MindTouch blog today that I think are of import. The first is about Open Core models. The second post is about my belief in open source.

80% Of The Functionality For 500% Of The Cost

The title of this blog post could be: Why open source matters to me, but I like the former because it’s racier and I hear that gets readers. Anyway, I was prompted to write this because of a comment and question posed me by a MindTouch open source community member that really is best answered/satisfied by me explaining this and also sharing my ideas about Open Core. At any rate, to answer why open source matters to me I really have to respond from two distinct perspectives. First I’ll answer it on a personal level and then as the CEO of an enterprise software company.

square avatarHere is my “Aaron hat”. I received my degree in Computer Science from UNC-Chapel Hill where I did pretty much all my course work, like most CS students, on an open source stack. I’ve helped to start several non-profits tasked with bridging the digital divide in under-served and predominately minority communities where I primarily used an open source stack. I’ve owned a couple small businesses in which I benefited a great deal by building on, guess what, primarily an open source stack. So, let me tell you on a personal level I have very strong convictions about open source. There are many reasons, but I will present you my top two.

Read more….

Posted in MindTouch, Software, Technology. Tags: , , . No Comments »

Toot, Toot! Goes My Horn, Flickr in Wordpress, Free AVI Player

January 28, 2009 — Aaron Fulkerson

Top Open Source Projects on Sourceforge.net

I know, I know. I’ll stop tooting our horn, but I checked in at Sourceforge to look at the MindTouch project rank tonight and I noticed MindTouch Deki currently bests even Azureus, arguably the most popular torrent client. You know what this means? MindTouch is more popular than porn and piracy. ;-)

It comes as no surprise to me that MindTouch is a topped rank open source project and a fast growing business. We have an amazing product. What is surprising to me how quickly we did this. In addition to the impressive expediency with which we’ve achieved our many impressive milestones it is also impressive how little resources that we’ve achieved this with. I look at the competitors we’ve surpassed, one in particular that has raised $16+ Million in tier one Venture Capital investment, had a three year head start on us, is stacked with weblebrities, is a darling of many A-list bloggers…and yet they don’t hold a candle to our community, our distribution and are likely barely beating us in revenue. I expect this year will change the last point. Anyway, I can’t help but smile and look to the next competitor to draft and surpass.

Next topic. I’ve been using Microsoft Live Writer periodically to post to Wordpress. Because I’ve consistently had problems with stability and buginess with Live Writer I’ve abandoned it. For the time being. Again. As such I needed a Flickr plugin. A Google search turned up “10 Amazing Wordpress Plugins for Flickr“. I’ve installed a few of these. I can report the only plugin that’s worth installing is Wordpress Flickr Manager. It works great. Makes embedding your Flickr photos a snap.

Need a free AVI player for Windows? I’ve plugged a couple players on the open source applications page here, and I finally got around to trying VLC Media Player. Superlative! I’m merrily watching ChiRunning.

Related articles by Zemanta
Posted in Software. Tags: , , , , . 2 Comments »

For the penguins…

December 20, 2008 — Aaron Fulkerson

centreI’m really psyched about our current campaign at MindTouch to encourage open source users to upgrade to the commercial build of MindTouch Deki. Any MindTouch Deki Open Source user that upgrades to MindTouch Deki Commercial (Deki Standard or Enterprise) will have a donation made on their behalf to the World Wildlife Fund, which will pay to save an endangered emperor penguin. Sarah describes it in full at the MindTouch blog. We just announced this campaign earlier this week in our December Newsletter. Last I checked, MindTouch had already saved six penguins on the behalf of others. The campaign got some pick up in the blogosphere too. Mhinkle wrote about it, as did Lisa at Ostatic.

Posted in MindTouch. Tags: , , . Comments Off »

I sound like a total wanker

December 9, 2008 — Aaron Fulkerson

I’m pretty hesitant to post this. This is really really old (in MindTouch time, it’s actually only a year old) and is a throw back to when MindTouch was solely focused on building community and adoption. Well, we nailed that out of the park and have since layered atop our community-centrism a business and sales unit. Nonetheless, these are our roots and I’m sharing this Microsoft produced video against my better judgment, after all I think I sound like a total wanker…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yuhbktv9pYs&hl=en&fs=1]

I should point out that the message in the video about being the best open source wiki is qualitative and stale. In fact, MindTouch is the MOST popular open source enterprise collaboration platform in the world. MindTouch Deki enjoys millions of users and hundreds of thousands of installations…all in less than three years of a public product wow… According to Sourceforge.net (the most active open source repository) MindTouch Deki is the top .001% of all open source projects.

Here is the Bitrock video. I like there video better. :-) Daniel and Erica are wonderful…oh and they have a great product too.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD406t-ffKk&hl=en&fs=1]
UPDATE: For whatever reasons it seems Microsoft took the videos off YouTube. Got me. Here’s another instance of the MindTouch “documentary”.

Posted in Journal, MindTouch. Tags: , , . 6 Comments »

By the transitive property, open source is soylent green?

May 21, 2008 — Aaron Fulkerson

Well, I know Matt says: “open source is all about…people” in this fabulous video he produced, but MHinkle made the soylent green reference and I’m trying to make use of that Discrete Math class I took in college that I don’t get much use out of now that I’m in management. :-)

Challengers of Open Source: Music video
by mjasay

Posted in Software. Tags: , , . Comments Off »

Windows Live Writer

April 3, 2008 — Aaron Fulkerson

2008-04-03_1712 I just read Roy’s blog post about XML-RPC interfaces and client side blog writers. I’ve tried out ScribeFire, which Roy reviews with:

ScribeFire seems *very* *very* unpolished. Their forums are filled with reports, and nobody responding to them. It didn’t seem to work very well with my test Tabulas account, so I’m not exactly filled with hope on that front.

I tried out ScribeFire a few months back and was initially very pleased with it. However, after a couple weeks of fighting with bugs I abandoned the plugin. It was just so damn buggy. Anyway, Roy mentioned Windows Live Writer; so, I downloaded and installed it. This is my first official post with it. Wow! this is frickin’ sweet. This is a really polished product. It’s even elegant, which is a clear indication this product was a Microsoft acquisition. It even has a bunch of useful plugins for things like Flickr, Picasa, paste from Visual Studio with syntax highlighting, and more.

I do have to complain about the install experience. It took forever. I have no idea what it was analyzing, but it "scanned" my computer for minutes. Also, it’s a damn shame Live Writer isn’t still open source as it was prior to the Microsoft acquisition of the company. Why Microsoft felt the need to close source this is beyond me. Doing so only diminishes the value of the product to users and Microsoft. Just idiotic.

Posted in Review. Tags: , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »
« Older posts