Software co-op/software reuse

Lee Gomes from the Wall Street Journal wrote an interesting piece (sorry, not a free site) in his Portals Column about Project Avalanche which is essentially a software co-op for businesses to share their applications and code. Current members include Jostens, BestBuy, and Cargill. According to Lee, the Avalanche Project was started because the founders kept asking themselves the following questions:

“Why were they writing such big checks to their software companies, but getting so little in return? Why were their in-house programming staffs writing the same sorts of custom programs written at thousands of other companies? If Detroit car makers can collaborate on research, why couldn’t U.S. technology users?”

The project is in its early stages but has grand ambitions. One of the founding members discusses what would happen if the group banded together to create their own CRM system or their own Linux-based desktop environment, saving all of the participants lots of dollars on licensing fees. While the idea of software reuse is not new, as developers have talked about this for years, the implementation via a co-op is what’s unique. In addition, most of the other companies or sites that I have seen specialize in sharing snippets of code versus full applications.

If you are interested about software reuse, I encourage you to read up on a company I met with early last year, Artifact Software. Artifact Software has a tool that allows developers to collaborate and create a code sharing community. Its initial target market will be selling to enterprises, allowing their developers to collaborate internally to become more productive. However, its business model is to seed the target market with its tools by allowing users to download its product for free and share code via an open website at www.codejack.com. The website currently lists 33k artifacts of code with over 23k users. Leveraging the open source philosophy, Codejack is not only about searching and finding code, but also about testing, rating, and reviewing code. Other companies to keep an eye on include Component Source and Logic Library which is more enterprise-focused. While developers have been talking about software reuse and its ancillary benefits for years, I have no doubt that given a tough climate for IT spending and the acceptance of open source, that the idea for software reuse and collaborative development will become a big topic again. In the long run, I am sure that the members of Project Avalanche will contribute and develop some interesting software.