Supporting open source users seems like a thankless job. There have been many blogs written on this topic. Developers have stopped maintain popular projects because of the burn this causes. People who use open source projects, indirectly assume that they are entitled to free support, even if they have taken no effort to understand the issue, or tried searching for a solution. Image by...
The ERPNext Conference is an annual event where the ERPNext community of users and developers meet and share their experiences of how they use ERPNext and what they expect from the project in the future. Attendees at the ERPNext Conference ERPNext today is used by more than 3000 companies across the globe and is one of the few fully open source ERP projects remaining (there are no closed modules)...
Over the last few months, I have interacted with a couple dozen awesome product startups in India as a part of product roundtables organized by iSPIRT, a non-profit industry group for software product companies in India. The roundtables that were in Pune, Delhi and Ahmedabad included around 8–10 product founders getting direct feedback about their products from their peers and experienced product...
When you analyze successful consumer and small business products, they succeed as a part of eco-systems and not just stand-alone products. Consumers and small businesses don’t buy products, the engage in an ecosystem. Facebook is an ecosystem. It is a network of users, groups, businesses and advertisers. Email is an ecosystem, smartphones are an ecosystem, even computers are an ecosystem. This is...
While open source software is a fairly well understood in concept, I am always surprised how little it is understood in practice. At a round table of young product companies last month, there were a lot of raised eyebrows and questions when I explained our open source way of working. Jordan Hubbard, co-creator of FreeBSD and open source veteran, spoke on this topic at this year’s ERPNext...
In year 2000, Apple was lagging far behind Microsoft’s Windows Operating System and it seemed there would be no way it could catch up. In a brilliant and desperate move, Apple decided to build its next generation operating system using the best open source technology available at the time. Steve Jobs hired Jordan Hubbard, the co-creator of FreeBSD, a popular Unix distribution and a well...
Last week a very interesting free e-book called “Software Paradox” was trending on Hacker News. The premise of the book is, that the value of software as a product is diminishing, but the value of software as an enableris rising. Pure play software companies such as Microsoft and Oracle are fading in comparison to rising stars such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and newer ones like Uber...
It is safe to say that Tally is the grand daddy of all Indian Software Products, the only company to have discovered the holy grail of selling software to Indian small businesses at scale. So when one of the key architects of the Tally sales network, Deepak Prakash (Tally employee #3) came down to Mumbai to do a iSPIRT Roundtable, there was little chance I would miss this. And Deepak Prakash did...
If you have any doubt that design of everyday things is the most important cultural movement of our time, then you need to look up the most valuable company in the world today, which is ofcourse, Apple. We want our tools to work flawlessly and naturally. Open source projects are catching up too.Elementary OS promises to finally make the Linux Desktop accessible for everyone. Many open source web...
Last week I was going through the startup class videos and one particular statement by Sam Altman stuck with me. He said “All successful founders are fanatics”. And YCombinator has seen a whole bunch of them. The way he puts it is very awesome, let me reproduce the statement here: “The word fanatical comes up again and again when you listen to successful founders talk about how...
