A year has gone by since I last posted about Liquibase, an open source database change management tool that I exclaimed is "one of the best software development tools I have used in recent years" in my first post of the series. All of these posts continue to remain some of the most visited pages on my blog, so when I was recently contacted by a startup that is looking to potentially commercialize Liquibase, I thought my readers would be interested in hearing about it.
In my opinion, this is an exciting development in the history of Liquibase. Recently contacting me via LinkedIn, the cofounder and CTO of the firm indicated that he was currently going through the "market validation" process of commericializing Liquibase. What is market validation? Essentially, it is assessing the marketplace to reduce risks associated with the offering of a new product.
And what do I mean by open source commercialization? Almost four years ago, I wrote a blog post on this subject for the now defunct thought leadership area of my consulting employer website that I recently reposted. I noted the following: "If you have not yet noticed, a fair number of open source software products have been acquired by commercial firms, and much open source has the backing of commercial entities, which has a number of implications, including the fact that when the choice of one of these products is made, one often has the choice whether to obtain support for a fee."
According to the individual who contacted me about Liquibase, with whom I exchanged emails and eventually spoke, other than my blog, the only other site he thought was worth mentioning on the subject of Liquibase is the one posted for IBM developerWorks by Paul Duvall. This particular post was made over four years ago, so the validity of the content may no longer be correct, but it does provide a good sense of what the tool is all about.
The startup is looking to potentially build a wrapper around Liquibase that will provide additional administrative features and other product features that will add to the functionality and ease of use of the software, while still retaining the integrity of the original code so that it can remain version agnostic as the open source version continues to release new versions on its end.
The individual mentioned that although he realizes there are some smart individuals in the development community such as myself who have no need for such repackaging, they see a need to do so in order to appeal to a wider user base. And of course, if there were nothing different with the commercialized version, the adoption rate would probably not increase. There are nuances with Liquibase that can only be discovered through usage, so it makes sense that some of these are worked out in an automated way transparent to the developer.
In providing a very high level overview of the two major projects on which I used Liquibase for clients, which you can read about in my earlier posts, it was interesting that the individual who contacted me wanted me to concentrate on the first of the two when answering his dozen or so market validation questions. Perhaps it was because of the nature of the project (creating a new enterprise database versus reverse engineering for virtualization), the specific database product (DB2 versus Oracle) for which I used Liquibase, or the development environment and team culture (larger versus smaller team, although I led both in an agile manner).
Market validation questions were additionally centered around the size of the technical staff at each client, the nature of each development project (custom software or heavy use of COTS), the level of SQL skills amongst developers, the development methodology used, the maturity of our release processes, as well as pain points with regard to database change management. In addition, I was asked a number of questions on technical subjects related to the project, and how they related in terms of impact.
The conversation was a very interesting experience. For confidentiality, I am intentionally ambiguous with regard to the clients and the startup that are the focus of this blog post, even though it has not been explicitly requested of me not to disclose this information. Looking back to one of my first jobs after undergrad, disclosing my client at the time was strictly verboten, so in the years since I have typically stuck to this practice for practical reasons.
Liquibase in the Enterprise: Part 1
Liquibase in the Enterprise: Part 2
Liquibase in the Enterprise: Part 3
Liquibase in the Enterprise: Part 4