Open source companies live or die by the health of their communities. WaveMaker's proudest achievement last year was creating a passionate and rapidly growing community.Thinking back, probably our most important decision affecting community health was made early in the year, when we decided to dump our AGPL license in favor of Apache.
Although we had never gotten direct feedback that the community didn't like AGPL, we had more forum posts than we thought was healthy that asked pointed questions about our licensing. This let us know that people were confused, and if there was any doubt in our minds, the licensing debacle at Ext js convinced us that Keep-It-Simple-Stupid is the only way to go here.
Once community developers felt confident that they could do what they wanted to do with our Community edition without somehow triggering a commercial fee down the road, the community literally exploded. Together, here is what we accomplished in 2009:
- Stunning community growth: 18 months after our product launch, the number of registered developers for WaveMaker (15,00) is about one third the size of the Spring community (49,000)!
- Profitability: WaveMaker closed 2009 as a profitable company and saw revenue growth of 53% in our last 3 months!
- Gartner recognition: WaveMaker was featured in 9 different Gartner reports last year, including one which identified WaveMaker as the only open source platform for cloud development!
- Web 2.0 enabler: at companies like Macy's, National City Bank and Pioneer Energy, WaveMaker enables non-Java developers to create Java apps with minimal training.
- Productivity multipier: at ISVs and systems integrators, WaveMaker reduces development costs for Java and Web 2.0 applications by over 75%.
