[Guest Post] Open Source: By the People For the People

The article below was contributed by John Seeds on behalf of Brightspot.

Have you ever discovered an amazing recipe that you told all your friends and family about?

You know something is great when you can't wait to share it. It evolves from there. Some can suggest a new ingredient, a substitution or even a new way of making it -- in the end the recipe is improved in function and complexity based on the feedback from multiple contributors.

Brightspot is a platfrom for creating and managing digital content in a really easy, but powerful way. We have a great software recipe that we’ve created by listening to our customers and providing solutions to common challenges. We are convinced that keeping Brightspot open source is the key to making it better every day.
 
By opening the Brightspot source repository to the world, we’ve made it possible for anyone to contribute their ideas to the project. As David Habib, Group Director of Development and Operations says, “Innovation comes more freely when there’s a broader set of minds working on the platform.”

Different solutions can be tried and tested and new ideas are surfaced organically based on the real needs of real users. Open source projects like Brightspot thrive by having whole communities find problems, create solutions, and suggest improvements.

Hyoo Lim, Chief Architect, states that having the code base publicly accessible makes it a more resilient platform. “With open source, there’s always someone to help look at the code, so more people, outside the company, can find any issues or suggest new features.”

By keeping the Brightspot code publicly available, we are able to draw on the new innovations of a broader community. The platform has come to include many innovations originally built for one particular client or project. Clients and partners can help validate different use cases and allow Brightspot to adapt the best ideas into the next generation platform.

The great strength of bringing Brightspot into the open source paradigm is more… “There are more eyes on the project,” says Hyoo. “There’s a community that can look at, and peer review the source code to advance the platform for everyone.”

Translation; more contributors, more developers, more ideas, more testers, more problems solved, more ways to organize and present content, more time saved and more people impacted. We encourage developers to use it, to develop web sites to work with it, and to expand upon it.

Brightspot also caters to specific businesses with a hybrid model that incorporates proprietary enterprise features developed to meet more detailed customer demands. Habib states that, "the enterprise features may not always be useful to the broader community but allow our clients to scale effectively with repeatable add-ons. Retaining the intellectual property for added functionality keeps a high level of flexibility to the platform while decreasing the time-to-market."
  Learn more about Brightspot’s enterprise solutions or download the open source version.

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