I came across this search engine today and I think its quite amazing to see something like this. Its a step in the direction to humanize search engines and I think its a pretty cool thing.

Check this out -> www.msdewey.com

What incentive does a commercial organization have to build an open-source software? Why will a programmer spend time and effort in contributing to any open-source product?

These are some questions that we tend to avoid. We are an open-source web development company. Each day of our company is spent working with PHP/MySQL/Apache and Linux. These are all very powerful open-source products. We generate revenue by creating application based on these platform or co-opting them in commercial projects or by customizing an open-source product to individual business needs. But, what is the economic benefit for the programmers who created these applications or extend them continuously?

I recently came across an article from Harvard Business School - Working Knowledge that answered some on these questions.

Benefit to a Programmer
A programmer will volunteer for a project only when they see a “net benefit” in doing so. “Net benefit” consists both of monetary benefits (immediate benefits) and non-monetary benefits (or delayed benefits). Monetary benefits are easy to visualize if the programmer is working on a commercial project. It will normally include things like Salary and Bonuses.

Non-monetary benefits the author says, consists of improved chances of receiving future job offers, shares in commercial open-source, access to venture capital and ego gratification (my personal favorite). The group of programmers working on an open-source also share very strong alumni relationship with each other and will be available to help in future.

In a commercially created program, outsiders can’t really tell who did what. Open source is different. As Lerner and Tirole write, “Outsiders are able to see not only what the contribution of each individual was and whether that component ‘worked,’ but also whether the task was hard, if the problem was addressed in a clever way, whether the code can be useful for other  programming tasks in the future,” and so on.

Thus, a programmer can prove that he is competent and his career prospect greatly increases. The commercial world will offer an opportunity only when capability and credential have already been established, whereas the open-source world offers an opportunity to establish that credibility in the first place. The full working paper can be accessed from here.

It seems that all that notion of altruistic programmer is not entirely true and it simply may be a gateway to enter into the commercial world.

Script2Please.com was first opened for business in October of 2003. Prior to that we were focused mainly on web design services. The size of the company was about 18 people with equal number of both web designers and web developers. Script2Please.com was made to serve one purpose above all i.e. to market web programming services.

The design of the old website itself was mainly around getting organic traffic through SEO. We created a lot of pages around topics that were popular keywords i.e. custom web development, PHP programming, .net programming, oscommerce customization etc. Our strategy was simple, we wanted a visitor to come to our website on a landing page that is specific to their search term and then chances are that they will place an enquiry with us. The conversion rate was also worked out and we knew how much traffic we wanted so as to have “X” number of inquiries in a month.

Overall, the website contained around 100 pages, if not more. After around 3 months, our efforts started paying off. We ranked #1 for a quite a lot of keywords that we targeted. I think it was probably in middle of 2005 that Google updated its algorithm (Florida Update) and we lost a lot of rankings and traffic to that. But, the site still continued to attract a lot of traffic. In the past 3 years the site has done a good job for us. It generated around 60,000 unique visits annually and we got to a level where we had the largest concentration of PHP workforce in India. The terms “I have an Idea”, “I want to Sell” and “I want to Save” where used in so many websites. The design was also copied by many companies who saw our success and tried to copy.

It makes me feel nostalgic to think about the incredible journey that we have taken. We currently employ 150+ designers and developers and I am proud to say that Script2Please.com was an important contributor to the growth of Indus Net Technologies.

However, in order to fuel our next stage of growth, we realized that we need to change the overall business strategy. The structure of Script2Please.com was not fitting the way we wanted to do business with our customers. Making in change was risky because the site was very popular on search engines and was generating good business. But, we decided unanimously that it did not reflect our new strategy and hence we decided that its time for a change.

We redesigned and officially re-launched Script2Please.com on 8th January. Please note that I am using the word re-launched and not re-designed. This is because the new Script2please is not just a redesigned website but it is also a representation of our business model.

The new site is built is built around 3 dimensions of our business i.e. Services, Technology and Engagement Models. Currently, the site offer 3 services (Custom Web Development, Web Enablement and Open Source Customization) on 3 technology platforms (PHP, .NET and Ruby on Rails) on 2 Billing Models (Fixed Price and Dedicated Hiring) .

This structure has two advantages:

1. Any changes on either Services, Technology or Model can be mapped to website easily without having to disrupt the other parts.

2. It allows the customer to have the flexibility to choose the way they want to work with us. Mathematically, there are around 18 possible ways in which a customer can work with us. For example: Custom Web development in PHP using Fixed Price or Web Enablement using .NET using Dedicated Hiring. This is certainly a kind of flexibility that our competitors either don’t offer or don’t convey.

The old version of Script2Please.com can still be seen here and the current version is live at www.script2please.com

Old Site

New Site