Joyent

Joyent Weblog

Joyent Connector to be Open Sourced

By David Young 17 May 07

I am pleased to announce Joyent will be open sourcing our Connector team collaboration suite under the GPL v2. We hope to have the code and a community platform ready for public consumption by the end of June, 2007. Luke Crawford, of Joyent, will be the Project Director and Joyent’s other developers will continue to further develop Connector along with, it is our hope, a community of Rails developers who want to build the best web suite possible on the net.

Why?

Joyent is taking this step for three reasons. First, we believe that in the software-as-a-service business, the business is service not software. The electrical company makes significant money delivering an open source commodity that I can make by simply putting on some wool socks and shuffling across the carpet. The fact is, if you write a web application, most of your important code, the user experience code, the CSS, Javascript, can be seen by developers. It’s already open and they can copy it.

The second reason we’re doing this: Connector is at a point where community involvement makes sense. Had we done this one year ago, the result would have been a mess. It’s important to us that the community take part. Let’s not play catch-up to the closed source web collaboration suites on the web today. There’s a certain perceived irony on our part that Web 2.0 has meant more open APIs but more closed source stacks. Connector changes this.

Third, we want to continue to give back to the Rails and Ruby communities. Our Slingshot product was the first major push in “giving back”. Joyent Connector is the next one. There will be more. The vibrancy of the Rails ecosystem relies on more than the framework. It also relies on the number and quality of free and open sourced applications available in the ecosystem. I believe this has been one of the strengths of PHP.

Joyent’s Continued Investment in Connector.

Joyent will continue to invest heavily in further development of Connector. We have a full product roadmap for our developers. Today we will be shipping “Lists” a web-based outliner that supports OPML. (More later.) That’s significant investment. We’re working on “Web” that will be a unique take on group web service management (blogs, wikis, svn, etc.) We will be doing “Chat” later this summer, and have plans to do a web-based “White Board” in the coming months. Joyent Connector is a fully integrated suite that recently was named the “Best Office 2.0 Suite” at the 2006 Office 2.0 conference. It has received lot’s of praise for its user-experience design. If you know how to use one Joyent application, you know how to use every Joyent application. We’ll work with the community to ensure this continues to be the case.

Other Notable Items.

We will be open sourcing the Rails code for Joyent Connector but not the configurations and system architecture that allow us to run large-scale IMAP, MySQL, Jabber, WebDAV and LDAP services for the hundreds of thousands of users we support today (with more to come through our partnership with Corel). We will provide details and HOWTOs on how to get the entire Connector stack running. Joyent Connector will continue to be offered to customers in a software-as-a-service model and we will have commercial licenses available for those that would like service and support creating their own Joyent Connector-based online offerings. There is no intention at this time to offer a community and “pro” version of Connector. The version of Connector that runs on joyent.net will be the same open source version available under the GPL.

Join Us in the Suite.

I hope you will join us to make Connector the best suite on the web. If you’re at Railsconf in Portland, come by the presidential suite at the Doubletree Hotel at 1000 NE Multnomah (room 1555) from 3:30-5:30PM every day for a happy hour we’re throwing. We’d love to show you Connector. Let’s connect.


  1. Kudos. Nicely done. This has been an exciting week for Joyent and the community.

    — Eugene Chan    461 days ago    #

  2. Wow… Didn’t see that one coming. Amazing.

    — anoop    461 days ago    #

  3. I hope this means an API is coming soon, whether from Joyent or some third party. I want to make Lists work with Quicksilver.

    — fitzage    461 days ago    #

  4. difficult decision, I’m sure, but I think one that will benefit you in the long run.

    — Alex    461 days ago    #

  5. Are there any plans to speed up load times within connector?

    Or make it hang less often while loading?

    — Walker Hamilton    461 days ago    #

  6. Congrats David and company.

    — Kyle    461 days ago    #

  7. This is definitely a good news, but also a courageous one to make! I joined Joyent partly because of Connector and I am sure by opening it up can lure even more people to use it.

    — Ronnie    461 days ago    #

  8. Walker, they’ve been doing this all along. It’s much faster than it used to be, and has way fewer hanging problems. I haven’t had much trouble lately at all.

    I know your question was meant more to stir the pot, but the answer is obviously “yes.” They’re continuously working on it.

    — fitzage    461 days ago    #

  9. Yes, it was meant to “stir the pot”.

    I love using connector, but am having trouble getting one of my partners (in particular) to use it. It’s speed and hanging frustrates him….so the tagging, comments, shared calendars, notifications, etc….are useless within my company, for the most part because many people will not check the system. The just use the joyent mail server as an IMAP server for email and that is it.

    It frustrates me, as Connector was supposed to be a tool to help our collaboration, not one that instead gets ignored and does nothing more than our previous POP email accounts did.

    — Walker Hamilton    461 days ago    #

  10. Thanks, this is great news (for you as well, i sincerely believe). I can’t wait to see how Connector works under the hood.

    — Olav    461 days ago    #

  11. I absolutely love the look/interface of Connector but have to admit – it’s painfully slow.

    Maybe for the reason why twitter is slow.

    — Greg    461 days ago    #

  12. Wow! I never thought that I would see the day. Congratulations. I wish you all continued success.

    — Jonto    461 days ago    #

  13. This is very exciting, guys…I’ve been desperately hoping for a decent Rails-based groupware suite to drop as open source, so I can finally kill our awful Horde/IMP webmail system here at work. (We have a lovely, scalable IMAP/LDAP/RDBMS infrastructure, but no decent end-user applications to point at it.)

    I’ll definitely be swinging by the exhibitor floor and/or suite to talk timelines and resource requirements.

    — Lennon Day-Reynolds    461 days ago    #

  14. Today we will be shipping “Lists” a web-based outliner that supports OPML. (More later.) That’s significant investment. We’re working on “Web” that will be a unique take on group web service management (blogs, wikis, svn, etc.) We will be doing “Chat” later this summer, and have plans to do a web-based “White Board” in the coming months. Joyent Connector is a fully integrated suite that recently was named the “Best Office 2.0 Suite” at the 2006 Office 2.0 conference.

    I personally think Joyent should development a project management tool that could dove tail into Connector.

    Joyent products are SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much better than 37signals, it’s not even funny.

    Viva la Joyent!

    — Tim    461 days ago    #

  15. more good news.

    Joyent keeps making one smart decision after another. and more importantly, for all the right reasons.

    Joyent definitely groks the ever-changing IT landscape more than most companies.

    — David M. Besonen    461 days ago    #

  16. I found this great site http://www.Listio.com and its a place that you can submit and vote on your favorite web 2.0 applications. See what are really good and which ones aren’t!

    — Sam    461 days ago    #

  17. Wow! Looking forward to it.

    — Ben Alpert    460 days ago    #

  18. so… where’s lists?

    — Bastiaan Terhorst    459 days ago    #

  19. Update: Hey everyone. We at Joyent have all been at RailsConf this week + things have been kind of hectic. We didn’t get Lists out the door the other day, but it’s online now! We hope you love it as much as we do.

    — Luke Crawford    459 days ago    #

  20. Uhm where is the source :) ?

    Thanks,

    ~jason

    — Jaosn    413 days ago    #

  21. er any update on open sourcing the connector?

    — teroz    412 days ago    #

  22. take a leaf from openmoko hey they give a date and mean it :(

    — yannish    408 days ago    #

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