Covide going open source
Thursday, January 8th, 2004
Years ago I worked for a small company named Terrazur (back then it was named Assist-Online, actually). There I continued something which I started with Zetion. This something happened to be our graduation project from college. At Terrazur I worked as an intern on improving and adding various modules to Covide (at one time called Quin!Net… aaah, sweet memories).
Anyway.. After my internship there I continued to work on it for a while as a Holiday job, and after that I left the company. Since then it has grown and grown… into a very nice webbased groupware product. A friend of mine, sometimes referred to as mafkees, still works there, and he had a little announcement to make:
Covide is going open source. Pending consultancy from an employee of the dutch Chamber of commerce, they will decide on a license under which it will be released. I am of course hoping for something GPL compliant like the Perl Artistic License or perhaps LGPL or even GPL. The project will be served by sourceforge at http://covide.sourceforge.net. Exiting!
Once again, even though Terrazur is only a small company, it is setting presedences in it’s target market. This is a sure sign that companies are starting to feel confidence enough in Open Source that they are willing to engage in it. As the chief-executive of Terrazur, Willem Masier, obviously understands: The money is in the support, hosting, consultancy and customization, not in the software itself. This is especially true for small companies who wouldn’t make a dime selling shrink-wrapped software and having to compete with giants like Microsoft.