Welcome & Open Source Strategy
Thursday, August 10th, 2006Welcome to Shedd Technologies International’s new blog!
News and information pertaining to our product development division have been scarce recently, so I wanted to take some steps recently towards reviving this portion of our work. As you may know, Shedd Technologies International largely consists of myself, along with various contract developers and other interim staff members that I utilize. However, a majority of the code associated with our products was developed by myself. That includes DLMan, Support Services Manager, Affiliate Manager, and PhotoGal.
I’ve been searching for ways to revive and imbue new interest in these offerings. One of the prime considerations was to re-release everything as Open Source code. My reasons were multi-faceted. First, and foremost, Open Source projects have been such a large portion of the work that Shedd Technologies International completes. Sure, there’s some commercial software running (namely, vBulletin and PHP Live Helper) online and we use proprietary development tools like Microsoft and Adobe products locally, but almost every project completed has utilized PHP, MySQL, Perl, Python, (recently) Ruby on Rails, and so many other smaller projects. So, in no small way, it was the Open Source community that made it possible for me to bring Shedd Technologies International to where it is today. It was time to give back. My participation in the inaugural Google Summer of Code last year also went a long way towards convincing me of the power of the Open Source community model.
While I was considering all of this, Google went ahead and opened it’s Google Code (Open Source) Project Hosting (http://code.google.com/hosting/) offering. As a more user friendly alternative to SourceForge, this was the final catalyst I needed.
The first project to go live under an Open Source license will be our DLMan digital product distribution system (www.dlman.com). Until now, it’s been only available under a EULA that restricts distribution. I initially selected this to allow Shedd Technologies International to recoup development costs, but now, three years later, the entire application and supporting plugins & patches will be re-released under the GPL. This includes the 1.1.2RC version of the main DLMan script, “New Order” system, and the 1.1.2 version of the shopping cart along with assorted patches.
I just committed the code for these scripts and components to the Subversion (SVN) repository (In fact, I did this from the road - if that isn’t commitment to Open Source, I don’t know what is!). You can access the project on Google’s servers at http://code.google.com/p/dlman/ - I still have multiple changes to make to the DLMan site to correctly reflect this, but I wanted to get this news up quickly…
Support Services Manager and Affiliate Manager will follow in the next few weeks. I’ve been constantly asked recently why the development effort has slacked off on these applications. Hopefully, this will make up for that and inspire new users to check out the applications for the first time. If other developers would like to download the source, extend upon it, release contributions/new features, that is allowed under the GPL and I’ll certainly make sure that we do everything to support that.
Thank you for your continued support of Shedd Technologies International. We look forward to having you around while we continue to improve our offerings for the community.
Robert Shedd
President, Shedd Technologies International