This blog is turning into a funeral home. It certainly wasn’t my intension. If I get to have it my way, my next post wont’t be so dreary but exciting. Not about ServerPress or DesktopServer, but rather what I’ve been working on in the last 30 days after closing up shop.
While I’d love to comment on the last year that brought about the eventual demise of ServerPress, the wound is still fresh. Cathartic are all the emails of thanks, “you helped put my kids through college”, and sorry to see you go messages. It’s a good thing I’m emotionally slow and take LOTS of time to process things; otherwise I’d might slip up and say too much.
The truth is that DesktopServer was no Netscape browser. We helped launch countless thousands of websites; but we didn’t have millions of users. Would it benefit the community to open source it? I certainly think so. In fact, I’ve used the never-released-version of DesktopServer for my next big creation (a completely unrelated project to ServerPress or DesktopServer). The last never-seen version is stable, it’s clean, and it’s fast. But sometimes it takes a village to get a project off the assembly line. In the early days of DesktopServer I attended more social events, did demos, videos, wrote literature, and was more involved with the community. Meetups, WordCamps, those were the good old days. In fact, in those days, I helped found the Advanced WordPress Group in San Diego and its corresponding Facebook group that’s still alive and going strong today. Now officially older than DesktopServer. I stepped down from all of that more than half a decade ago and I can’t say that was a good thing.
To fully open source software requires coordination and agreement from all IP holders. To successfully open source software requires a lot more. I still can’t comment on DesktopServer’s last unreleased version. Maybe someday I can. But the effort I put into creating that last unreleased version isn’t a complete lost. That tough lesson taught me to remember to do it right next time; keep up with the community and have gratitude all the way down the assembly line. My next project is putting me back in a happy space and I‘m excited to say it’s open source.