Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category
It’s been an interesting (and eventful) couple of weeks for us, and we’re announcing today a major refocusing of Squish Software.
The most pertinent news at this time is that, as of right now, ServeBlast and its services are no longer available for subscription due to previously unforeseen and sudden issues with a third party vendor. Current BlastHoster clients will have their hosting remain online and fully functional through the billing month of May, at which point the service will go dark. We will, of course, assist them in finding a comparable host to switch.
The Automatic Website Backups software is currently going under a thorough code review, and once that is complete and deemed successful, will be released under the AGPL as promised. We apologize to those interested in this code for taking so long, but we need to make sure everything is in order before we can relicense our code.
This does not mean that Squish Software is dead. Squish Software is far from dead — we’re, in fact, previewing two products we have in the pipeline today.
The first is an iPhone application called DataTap. It’s sort of like a central ‘dashboard’ that you can quickly glance at to get an idea of, for example, how many unread emails you have, quickly grab the latest stories on your RSS feeds, check the weather, or get the latest prices on your stocks, all in one app. Since everything loads at once, this significantly reduces the time necessary to keep yourself up to date. We aren’t entirely sure about how we can open source DataTap due to the restrictions Apple places on developers through their NDA and the App Store, but we’re nonetheless looking at our options.
The second is a web service we’re calling Esse. At its core, it’s a nice, easy-to-use, and versatile sales tracking system, but what makes it unique is its pattern detection algorithms that can determine, for example, whether the slow-down of a certain product or category of products is in line with current overall sales growth, or how the price change of a high-volume product has affected its sales, taking into account its past sales history, as well as overall sales change since the price modification. Esse will be available under the AGPL upon release (however we are looking at dual-licensing for enterprises interested in fully integrating Esse into their current solutions, though this isn’t entirely finalized).
Neither of these products are available yet — DataTap will probably be available in a couple of weeks, while Esse won’t be available for many months, so we’ve setup on both products’ landing pages a place where you can provide us with your email address to which we will email you information about the product when it launches or as it comes closer to launch.
To signup, go to ItsEsse.com or DataTapApp.com. We appreciate all of your support in the past and we look forward to hearing from you in the future.
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Announcements,
Morals on July 24th, 2008, by Ben.
No comments.Today marks what we believe to be a very important step in progression of the open web. Earlier this morning at OSCON, David Recordon of Six Apart announced the launch of the Open Web Foundation.
The website’s own short summary, I think, does the best justice in describing its goals:
We love that idea.
We really believe that, for some time, all future innovation will be directly imposed on the web, or will somehow be web-related. There was this same period just a decade or two ago on the desktop. Unlike what happened with most of the important protocols and formats that came out of the desktop innovation period, I think there’s a really good chance that most of what comes out of this period of innovation will, indeed, be open.
This is why the Open Web Foundation is so important — there needs to be a place accepted by the “major players” in the Internet space (Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace, SourceForge and Six Apart are among the founding members) that is simply there to incubate and further develop these specifications, as well as keep them open and make sure that there are no Intellectual Property issues in using these specifications in your own products, regardless of whether those products are proprietary or open source.
When the website launched, we were quick to jump and apply. I am pleased to say that Squish Software is now a contributing member of the Open Web Foundation. We hope to contribute wherever we can with whatever we can, as well as make sure that all applicable open web standards are used in our products.
We look forward to what comes out of the Open Web Foundation. The future could be very, very exciting (and very, very open).
Although this blog post is relatively short, the importance of it can’t be overstated.
When we launched Squish Software, we had goals of “open software.” We realized that openly supporting free and open source software, while not contributing back with our own software, was sort of hypocritical.
So today we’re very excited to announce that we’re beginning to phase out ‘open software,’ and phase in true free software. Within the next few weeks, we will place ServeBlast Automatic Backups under the GNU AGPLv3. We’re presently obligated to not release the core of BlastHoster under the AGPLv3, but hopefully by the end of the summer, we will be rewriting BlastHoster’s core from the ground up and moving it to a custom infrastructure. At that point, we will be able to put BlastHoster under the AGPL.
Backup Hosting and Temporary Hosting will almost certainly be available under the AGPL at the time of launch.
We are currently putting together a new section of our website for developers interested in playing around with our code. In the mean time, we’ve replaced our Open Software website section with a new Free Software section — be sure to visit it if this interests you.
We’ve been in contact with the Free Software Foundation, and they have been answering some legal questions we’ve had. We’re extremely grateful for all of the work they’ve done in the past and are continuing to do. We agree with their beliefs that web services under the AGPL only increase innovation due to the very strong nature of the AGPL’s copyleft, and we look forward to working with them in the future.
More on this process as it goes forward!
In
Announcements,
ServeBlast on June 26th, 2008, by Ben.
3 comments.After today’s launch, a number of people contacted us (and Gabe Jacobs blogged about it) to let us know that they thought a base fee of $14.95/month for our Automatic Website and Database Backup service was a bit higher than they would expect.
We agree. So we’ve lowered the price down to $10.75/month, which, at this time, anyway, is the lowest we can put it at while still making a profit larger than 2 or 3 cents.
The price change is effective immediately.
Also, it’s important to note that there is a difference between what we’re calling “open software” and open source software. While we’re huge proponents of open source software and will never migrate our infrastructure to Windows Server, Mac OS X Server, or the like, they are not one and the same.
Open software, simply and crudely put, gives some of the benefits of open source software (maximized customizability, possibilities for third party extensions where it makes sense, etc.), not all of the code is open. We certainly see ourselves opening useful portions of our code as time goes on, it’s currently not a feasible business model to open source all of our code while still trying to make a profit.
Perhaps some of our future web services will be under the AGPL (Affero General Public License — basically the GPL modified for web apps and services) or similar copyleft licenses; it’s definitely something we’re considering.
Similarly, the pricing for temporary hosting and backup hosting isn’t anywhere near finalized; those were rough estimates — to prevent future confusion, we’ve taken them off of our site.
We’re always looking for additional feedback– please feel free to contact us at any time either through that contact form, through comments, by sending us an email (firstname at squishsoftware dot com — ben at squishsoftware dot com, etc.), or however else you think is appropriate.
In
Announcements,
ServeBlast on June 26th, 2008, by Ben.
2 comments.For programmers, the first thing you do when you begin learning a new programming language is spit out the text “Hello world” in some way. So, the same should apply with the launch of a new software company.
I’d like to welcome Squish Software to the world. Over the coming hours, we’re launching two web services announcing two other web services which will be available for pre-order. I encourage you to read the big press release in the next post. We think we’re doing some pretty exciting stuff, and of course, we hope you feel the same.
But it’s important that a software company do more than just develop software and services. It’s important that the company be founded on principles that benefit everyone — developers, designers, businesses, and of course, consumers.
Our commitment to open software does just that. We’re taking an approach that provides the essential “best of both worlds” from the open source community and the closed source community. We’re fervent believers in open, standardized formats like ODF and PDF. We also strive to make our applications as customizable as possible, and are always taking suggestions on how to make them more customizable. But at the same time, you’ve got a physical company behind the products (which isn’t always true with open source packages) that offers full and constant support (which, again, isn’t always true with open source packages).
Let me introduce you to the Squish Software staff:
* Ben (me), 14: Linux, open source, Google, and Linux fanatic
* Ari, 13 (14 on July 1): Mac, and iPhone/iPod touch fanatic
* Jesse, 14: Online games fanatic
We’ll be updating this blog with product announcements, new features, bug fixes, and some insight into our morals concerning things like DRM.
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