Insoshi update
Michael Hartl
I'm writing to bring you a long-overdue update. The Insoshi founders
(including me and my cofounder Long Nguyen) have been busy the past
several months working with potential investors to make a
software-as-a-service business social network. As anyone who has done
it will tell you, dealing with investors is a huge time-sink;
moreover, since our proposed enterprise-focused product wasn't built
directly on the Insoshi open-source project, we haven't had much time
for continuing development. But we have been paying attention, so I'd
like to take this chance to address some issues that have been coming
up in the discussion group.
Several people have asked for some sort of groups functionality in
Insoshi. Unfortunately, after an initial burst of enthusiasm and some
brief attempts to implement groups, development and interest waned. We
did get one groups contribution, and I'm grateful for that, but the
feature came without tests, which means that it has never been merged
into Insoshi core. If anyone wants to pick up the groups feature and
test it, I'd be happy to accept the patch.
There has also been some discussion of Haml and Sass. I'm a big fan of
both, and will actually be talking about them at the Silicon Valley
Rails meetup next week, but I feel that porting Insoshi to use them
would be too big a change at this point. Switching to Haml would break
the application for any forks that have made changes to views, and it
would also add an extra dependency, which I'd rather avoid. Finally,
deviating from plain ERb might present a barrier to anyone looking at
Insoshi for the first time, and I'd rather err on the side of caution.
If we ever subject Insoshi core to a thorough refactoring, I might
reconsider, but for now we'll stick with ERb.
In development news, as of today we're releasing a version of Insoshi
compatible with Rails 2.2. Our releases are conservative by design;
though Rails 2.3 recently came out, we're going to delay a Rails 2.3
Insoshi upgrade until the newest version of Rails has proven its
stability in production. Eventually, I hope to update the code to take
more advantage of Rails 2.1+ features, especially named scopes, and
keeping basic compatibility is a good first step. As usual, you can
get the update at GitHub (http://github.com/insoshi/insoshi).
Finally, I'd like to close off the open loop from my discussion above
about raising money from investors. The venture capital (VC) firm
we've been working with looked likely to invest as recently as last
month, but a couple weeks ago they told us that, given the continuing
turmoil in the markets, they would fund us only if we had a mature
product and could show some traction---which, in VC-speak, is a polite
way of saying "no". After taking some time to think over our options,
Long and I have agreed that we are both better off pursuing other
opportunities at this time. We are therefore in the process of winding
down the business side of Insoshi, including making some changes (such
as merging the demo and developer sites) to streamline our web
presence.
Where does this leave the Insoshi open-source project? The software as
it stands is rock-solid and proven in production for many months. I
therefore would feel OK about just leaving it as-is. On the other
hand, I understand that many people would like to see Insoshi continue
to improve. After working on this project intensely for over a year, I
am depleted both financially and physically, so over the next few
months I'll be focusing on select consulting and contract work before
taking an extended break; if any of you would like to retain my
services for Insoshi/Rails consulting or for the implementation of
custom features, please contact me off-list to work something out. In
the longer run, I have several exciting projects planned, and one in
particular will benefit the Insoshi community. Stay tuned for an
announcement about that some time in the fall.
Cheers,
Michael
HeresTomWithTheWeather
i am looking forward to your announcement. thank you for insoshi.
we've used insoshi to raise awareness to tens of thousands of people
about the fraudulent credit card business. also, we've used insoshi
to allow people to obtain interest free, tax free credit within their
community in austin, texas and columbia, missouri. we might not have
realized these efforts without insoshi. your software rocks.
cheers,
tom
http://opensourcecurrency.org