Jeff Reifman, former Groundspring employee, reports that Groundspring has released EmailNow, DonateNow, Enterprise and ActionStudio as open source. The fine print: no support, no active development, no resources for community building. AdvocacyNow is being made available as a hosted service under the name eAdvocacy.
It will be interesting to see whether anyone is able and willing to pick up the ball and run with developing these codebases.
As Gunner and Katrin observed, someday this is all gonna make a great case study.
As far as I can tell as a relative outsider it would seem to make a great case study in a non-profit operating like a for-profit that more or less hides from customers and prospects that it’s failing. I certainly would have been quite hesitant to recommend DonateNow to a few clients over the past year if I had known about Groundspring’s troubles.
And I’m very curious about the fate of ebase and the good folks working on it given this…
http://www.idealog.us/2005/06/groundspring_sh.html
ted
To a certain extent, CiviCRM and our upcoming email and donation tools are “folks picking up the ball” and running with the innovations and ideas spearheaded by Techrocks, ebase and Groundspring.
We are in active development and have just released CiviCRM 1.0 Beta which can be demo’ed and downloaded at http://www.openngo.org/. We just posted the initial specs for the broadcast email tool here:
http://objectledge.org/confluence/display/CRM/Mass+Mailer+Project
Looking forward to a rich ecosystem of open source, interoperable nonprofit applications,
ebase seems to have developed just enough of a independent consultant/developer community to stagger on for a while… I hope. Unless the consultants all flee for greener platforms/pastures, which inevitably they eventually will. The only question I guess is how fast. It will almost certainly depend on whether Clif & Bob are interested in/able to generate enough consulting revenue to justify continuing to spend their time on ebase.
I am in the process of revising my online donation tools recommendations right now.