Date: Sun, 09 Mar 1997 10:08:38 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Neal Rigney <neal@pernet.net> Cc: Dror Matalon <dror@dnai.com>, isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ISP Billing Software Message-ID: <24370.857930918@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 09 Mar 1997 11:20:07 CST." <Pine.BSF.3.91.970309111753.21975A-100000@jennifer.pernet.net>
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> Would it be too much of a stretch to suggest maybe a group of us(isp'ers) > get together and write this software? It seems that everyone has the > same problem: they can't find software that fits their needs exactly. I > know what we're using works, but not *exactly* the way we want it to > work. I think it would be phenominally great for the ISPs to get together and do this, adding more weight to the arguments in favor of UNIX as a better, cheaper solution than NT for ISPs. If you wanted to make money on the final result, you could even do an NT version and soak the NT users for it if they want to run the billing system from a non-UNIX server. :-) However, history also shows that it's probably not going to happen as a group thing. Truly useful items of free "commercial quality" software like gcc, samba, and I daresay even FreeBSD, get written by a single developer or close-knit development shop working away in a corner, far away from anything even resembling a committee. Committee design efforts are death to stuff like this. It's going to take one or two people, working from a single Grand Vision of how to do flexible billing from a wide variety of data sources and scaled across a large number of organizational types, to basically knock the framework together and gather enough of an initial user base with the first ALPHA release that the ball starts rolling. Once it's got 10 or more customers and the core developers have proven their committment to improving and providing focus for the product, I think that its future would be fairly bright. These initial developers would have to be willing to volunteer their time and energy for uncertain (and possibly no) rewards, of course, and they'd have to be willing to invest at least 9 months of hard work into it, but all that done, I think they'd have a pretty significant shot at becoming the next "Apache" of the ISP billing software community. It's a long-shot, naturally, but then I'm sure that Dan Heller never expected to become a multi-millionare when he started giving away MUSH, either. :-) That effort eventually grew into Z-Mail and the rest is history. I don't think that this necessarily has that kind of potential, but it could probably eventually provide a tidy living for at least a couple of maintainers (and all done as "free software", so you get the warm fuzzies as a fringe benefit :-). Jordan
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