Over at IT Manager’s Journal they’ve published an article by Joe Barr that looks at the Journyx business model and how it relates to open source software & open source concepts. Joe interviewed Journyx founder and CEO Curt Finch and got the big guy to talk about some of the considerations that went into the initial development of everyone’s favorite time & expense application, Journyx Timesheet.
The elements of free software that survive today in the multi-platform TimeSheet application are indicative of its roots. The application began life running on variants of Unix: AIX, FreeBSD, and Linux. Finch explained:
“We included Python, and PostgreSQL, and Apache, and PyGres, which ties Python and PostgreSQL together, and PyApache, which ties Python and Apache together, and some other little free things, like HTMLGen, which is a Python toolset which helps you generate HTML on the fly, and we cleared all of this stuff into the app, and then wrote initially a pretty small amount of code to make it into a Web timesheet product, and started giving it away.”
Journyx started off using free software applications with TimeSheet, and free software has helped to shape its development to this day. Finch said that because they wanted to be able to give the app away, they were precluded from using proprietary tools — Crystal Reports, for example. He also noted that Journyx has tried to support the free software projects they use through contributions and community involvement. He said, “If you look on Pythonology.org, we’ve tried to do some joint press with them where we’ve helped show to the world that Python is a real, valuable, industrial-strength, and usable language.”
You can check out the article, Journyx and open source software, at the IT Manager’s Journal site at:
http://software.itmanagersjournal.com/software/05/10/25/1631220.shtml?tid=12