Big in Japan, the company behind social media tools, aimed at ‘prosumers’, such as FeedVault, PodServe, FrankenFeed, elfURL, InstantFeed, QwikPing and SocialMail, have announced that they will be releasing the source code to all their services under the GPL license, other than PodServe (and presumably Fancast, as that is aimed at the enterprise). They will also maintain the hosted version. The reason they have given is that in order to remain relevant the tools need a lot of work, but they are too busy working with paying clients (they also advise corporations on how to ‘do’ social media) to spend that time.

The services are often used as an example of what is possible with Ruby on Rails, and I would expect there are many developers who use Rails who will be gleefully digging in to see how things have been coded. This is certainly a good thing for the Rails language, which at present cannot compete with the number of blockbuster FOSS applications available for PHP/MySQL such as WordPress, phpBB, Drupal and ActiveCollab to name but a few.

#As the company remarks, this is an alternative strategy to simply selling the services on eBay, and I have to say the open source plan beats the eBay plan both for the company and for the consumer; BIJ get more advanced services which they can then put ads on for their hosting money and good PR and consumers get better services, presumably remaining free.

All in all, a potentially exciting move. It will be more so if and when they decide to open source PodServe, although that is becoming less relevant now that Odeo allows you to upload audio produced and edited locally. With any luck, this move will encourage more companies with services that are not gaining much traction to follow suite. It’s up to the open source community to make it work.