Soup of the Day

J’ai un ans (encore!)

Today marks the first anniversary of Polaris Digital Limited, which was registered with Companies House on April 18th 2006. It is still here and as you can see we have had a bit of a go at our logo and brand in general as we focus on our core values. All sounds very serious, but believe me it isn’t. All of this goes hand in hand with our new web presence that has been promised for months and will finally be arriving next month.

What is digital horticulture? We like to think of it as taking an idea and placing it in a digital environment where it can grow and evolve into something beautiful. One example of this might be our PDnH Server (PDOS/01) that has been in development for over a year now (and show’s no sign of stopping any time soon). Initially it was built to run our web site, but now it has expanded to run several more. With each new challenge it encounters, the feature set gets a little richer. Today PDnH Server is a completely alien animal from the first version and we are boldly heading for our first version 1.0 release by the end of September 2008.

Outside of PDnH Server we are also developing a new opensource project that will be announced in full in the coming weeks, but I can tell you the name now (as we have one). Polaris Digital Symposia (PDOS/02) will be released in June 2007 as a version 1.0 product. ‘Wait a minute’, I hear being cried from far off lands, ‘how is Symposia at version 1.0 when PDnH Server has been in development for over a year and is only at version 0.3.0?’. There are lots of ins and outs, but basically it boils down to these two factors;

PDnH Server was our first software development project and as such it has been an incredibly useful learning experience. When it started in 2005 I had an idea of what I wanted to achieve, but no clear direction for the project. As the needs have grown, so has the system. Last autumn I realised that the development track was a mess and it needed some serious refining. So come 2007 and the core has been completely re-written and now a new lean, mean, web serving machine rolls out. All of this experience has helped Symposia no end.

Secondly, Symposia is a specific piece of software that performs only one task, whereas PDnH Server has to perform different tasks for different people. In fact, Symposia is built upon the new core of PDnH Server so we’re recycling a lot of the code already tested. All of this helped us get Symposia to the state it is now and enable us to be confident that we can release it to the public in a matter of weeks.

So what is Polaris Digital Symposia? Stay tuned, all will be revealed! (hint: the name has a lot to do with it)

I can hear a lot of business minded people wondering how we ever make any money releasing all of our products for free. It is hard for a lot of traditional business models to get their head around opensource software and what it can do for them. To give you an idea, Polaris Digital made exactly £0.00 for 2006/7 in software sales. However we made a lot more on support and implementation of PDnH Server on client web servers. But because the software is open, people can go in for themselves and change things and add things, all of which helps us as we get development for free. If you’re a small company like us, then this kind of support is invaluable.

Until the internet, open source really didn’t explode onto the scene in the way it has now. It has always been around, particularly in the UNIX world, but now it is everywhere. The odds are you have used an open source application today. Actually you are right now as WordPress is open source software and all of this text has been served by it. There are millions upon millions of open source projects in the world, some are just ideas that never go anywhere, others are very powerful applications that are available for free and have thousands of developers all adding new and secure code. OpenOffice is probably the biggest and most famous of open source software after Linux.

Today open source is challenging the big players, particularly Microsoft who are not ready to open up any of their code yet. A lot of businesses cannot see how they could operate in a world where the software they laboured over for millions of man hours is released to the public for free. But this is just shortsighted. Being open source allows any interested party with an opinion on how the software should work to have an input, that’s anyone anywhere. It is the democratisation of software development and it’s a good thing. Google release about 80% of the work they do as open source code (via Google Code) and they make billions of dollars each year, so it can be done even for the big players.

With all of this in mind, Polaris Digital are happy to announce that all of our forthcoming software developments will be open source and open to everyone for free. In the words of the WordPress team, ‘code is poetry‘.

Finally I’ll leave you with this, which I happened to stumble across on YouTube! Hard to believe that this guy was my boss over a year ago… go Andy!