Birthing a Product
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008It all started as an enormous itch that needed serious scratching. We’ve been dealing, in our various capacities at hosting providers, with many incarnations of commercial server control panels like Ensim, Plesk and cPanel. Not only were these, in our view, haphazardly constructed kludges of magic that actively worked against the operating systems they were installed on; we kept coming back to the fact that people were actually paying for such software. Through the nose, no less. This felt wrong and paved the way for the OpenPanel project.
We spent over a year creating something with the capacity to change the landscape, by combining the proper amount of openness and flexibility with a state of the art user interface and a license that should make trumpets sound from the heavens. People we’ve shown it to have been raving. But, now that we’re at the point to hit the submit button for all this on sites like freshmeat, all those little doubts start setting in. It’s scary as hell.
I’m convinced we’ve taken the right step by not fully adopting the ‘release early’ mantra — it has given us the chance to quickly reshape the design where needed (Heck, we’re on the second incarnation of the GUI). But this is the downside. If you release early, expectations are lower and you never get this neckhair-raising fear of throwing your work into the world. Alas.
We’ve opened up the 0.9 (beta) branch of OpenPanel as of today. There’s no longer a requirement to email us to get access, just follow the download instructions from the main site. Messages have also gone out to the usual places. The future is now.
