Microsoft Denmark invited me to speak about how umbraco has grown from a hobby project to a full time business for me (and now Per). It's on the 24th of January in Copenhagen at their "Open Sovs" event where also super friendly Mads Kristensen from BlogEngine.NET will come.
It's a pretty good challenge for me. Looking back at experiences, mistakes, etc. I'll talk about selecting a license, my opinions on respecting the community as your biggest asset, why it's okay to charge for things and most importantly the excitement and joy an open source project gives you.
I'll also try to answer why it's possible for just one (oops - two) people combined with a stunning community to change history and to make an impact. How the world of software development has changed so fast that you turn old-school if you don't keep up constantly. Why the price of developing software has dropped at insane rates and how the cost of distributing software is as near null as possible.
Because the world has changed. Just looks at the post about bigger organizations using umbraco. Who would have thought that a year ago? That "enterprises" doesn't need an enterprise cms - and what the heck is ecms anyway, besides bloated features, cluttered work-flow systems and ridiculous license terms and pricing?
The change will continue in 2008 and umbraco will make huge waves. We have potential to make history. To become one of the first open source projects that makes a piece of free software the default choice in an area on a Microsoft platform. To democratize wcms. umbraco is available for you, me, your school, your work, the huge company in your city, the ngo.
And everybody has access to the very same piece of software. This is not pseudo free, where you'll need to pay for svn access, tracker access or even to a working official version. And the community alternative is a partly working, not updated version. That's not free, that's milking the viral marketing potential of open source without really wanting to swallow the pill. And that's the route to failure. And I'll make sure to emphasize that on the 24th! Go all the way or stay away.
I'll make sure to translate and publish my presentations to English when they're done. If you have time and understand Danish, join the event at Microsoft.