by Jonathan
I currently have a need for a forum system for a couple of small-scale clients, and my first thought was to look at Jive Forums. I used it for a big project a few years ago and was very impressed not just with the feature list, but with the clean way it was written (they give you almost all the source code, making it easy to extend, which was one of the key factors in choosing the product at the time). It‘s pretty well commented and full of textbook use of design patterns. It‘s all the more impressive because it started life as an open-source project.
Looking into the current offerings from Jive, I was disappointed to discover that they have discontinued all but one version of Forums, the one that used to be the Enterprise edition. It‘s priced at about US$25,000 for the first CPU. As one of my projects is a start-up and the other a charity, this is far, far beyond what they can afford (the charity would get a 20% discount, but $20,000 is still an indefensible cost for a charity when there are plenty of open-source choices around; I‘m now looking at JForum).
I asked my sales rep what had happened to the cheaper versions, and he confirmed that Jive is only interested (to paraphrase) in the mega-corporate market nowadays.
I‘ve long been an admirer of Jive Software (and still am), due to their product quality, coding standards and friendly attitude. (Full disclosure: they once sent me a free T-shirt years ago.) It‘s always struck me as a well-run business and I‘m sure their decision makes good financial sense for them. But I can‘t help finding it rather sad that, in going from open source to high-end market leader, they are now ignoring the low-end markets that helped them on the way; the wider community, the word of mouth recommendation that helps drive adoption and so on.
The model of open source software with the option of commercial support is currently very widespread, but what happens if more companies take their open-source product and develop them into closed-source offerings? If Jive Software can be so successful, others will surely follow. The moral, I suppose, is always download a copy of the sources while you still can.
