opendms
all working together
the vision is 20/20
no confusion with what we are trying to do; it's all in the execution
the community is the key
opendms relies on community and community involvement; it's plain to see
it's as plain as day
opendms has a simple vision; “to be the project that revolutionizes IT product and service provision to dealer groups world-wide”. We know that sounds grandiose but believe in it absolutely. Peter Drucker offers much insight into modern business management and his advice that “the best way to predict the future is to create it” is at the heart of what the opendms team is trying to do.
Unfortunately, if you start quoting Drucker, you have to take the good with the bad and he goes on to say that “plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work”; there is no doubt that for opendms to achieve its vision a lot of hard work will have to be undertaken.
That said, at the heart of the opendms project is a unshakable belief in the strength of numbers and the absolute certainty that the new “community” business model tied to open source licencing will guarantee the project’s success. Over the past 15 years there has been remarkable growth and huge success in the open source arena; Microsoft have leveraged their future growth on open source as have Google, Twitter, Amazon etc. Et al.
The reason open source works is that it allows all partners in the open source endeavour to “own” the product. Further, it allows stakeholders to value-add the product with their own intellectual property and expertise and commercialize that particular enterprise whilst maintaining the no-cost foundation of the open source project.
opendms is predicated on a not-for-profit operational framework with dealer members paying a monthly membership fee that is linked absolutely to the last quarter’s operating costs divided by the number of dealer members. The more dealer members opendms has, the less the individual cost for each member.
Further to this the opendms core portal and middleware will always be open source and free and there is great scope for all stakeholders to tap into the opendms core and value-add the project increasing the strength and fitness of the opendms project completely.
As mentioned elsewhere, it is our vision to build the opendms core offering with as much content as possible and to attach independent third-party products and services so that, ultimately, the sum of all the parts will be a replacement for traditional DMS offerings at a fraction of the cost and with each dealer member being able to influence the direction of development directly and absolutely.
unlocking the potential of open source
Linus Torvalds (the father of the most successful open source endeavours ever; “Linux”) is quoted as saying “in real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny”. Perhaps it’s more a case of having the “responsibility” of doing it.
It is difficult for people to get their heads around something costing nothing being a business opportunity; it is so counter-intuitive that most people, when considering an open source opportunity, immediately proceed to do absolutely nothing.
The opendms core and middleware components will be open source and free to use. The control of the portal and middleware will stay with the opendms management team to guarantee its reliability and security but all community members will be able to access the products and services of the core product for a single monthly membership fee that’s sole purpose is to cover the cost of running the opendms project.
opendms will not succeed without the support of the community. opendms is an example of cloudfunding at its finest and the more members joining and covering the not-for-profit cost of the management team the less the monthly fees will be.
Once again, if anyone has any difficulty getting their head around the whole opendms project it will be the not-for-profit “open” nature of it and the question on their lips will be “what’s in it for them?”.
It’s simple really, the opendms initiators are all dealers and, with or without the opendms project, would be funding and developing their own IT solutions. With opendms they get the opportunity of continuing that path BUT with a greatly reduced cost; it’s as simple as that really.
If you buy into the opendms concept you’ll be a part of this project, benefit from it directly and reduce the absolute cost on your business so you’ll get out of it exactly what the initiators of the project want; a world-best suite of IT products and services for their dealership at a fraction of the cost of a traditional DMS offering.
If that is not a worthy goal to aim for then opendms is going nowhere.
