Lars Trieloff was already familiar with open source software before he launched Mindquarry as a business based on it. Trieloff studied in Germany at the Hasso Platner Institute, where he received a degree in software systems engineering. During that time he noticed that, outside of the software development industry, true collaborative efforts didn’t happen often, and when they did, there often wasn’t an efficient and user-friendly way to conduct that collaboration.
“I had the idea to create collaborative software that combines aspects from software systems such as wikis, version control systems, issue tracking systems, and mailing lists,” Trieloff says. “I was accustomed to using these tools, and I found it irritating that collaboration outside of the software development industry did not work. [At one job,] after spending a week setting up version control, wiki, and bug tracking, I was frustrated, because I could not convince my co-workers to use these tools, no matter how productive we might have been. Their complexity and power made them nearly unusable.”
That’s when he got the idea for Mindquarry. Mindquarry is open source, collaborative, and easy to use, says Trieloff. It’s designed to remove the usability barrier.
After the usability barrier comes what Trieloff calls “data lock-in. We allow our users to cross this barrier by offering an open REST API and standards-based storage. The third barrier is lock-out of users due to restrictive proprietary licenses. With our participatory open source model we are tearing down this third barrier.
“My original idea was not to make [it] open source,” he says. “I already had gathered experience as a user, contributor, and developer in open source, but had not thought about the business opportunities in open source until my co-founders Alexander Saar and Alexander Klimetschek and our investor pointed me in this direction. It then became obvious: what the world needs is not only better software for supporting the teamwork of knowledge workers, but that in order to make the software useable by everyone, we had to remove all barriers.”
Trieloff says he’s on the pragmatic side of the open source philosophy. “We are offering open source, not because I believe software must be free, but because I believe it is the best option for customer and vendor,” he says. “Since the late 1990s I have been using open source software. My first real open source software was PHP3 and MySQL. I chose them not because they were free, but because they gave me options to develop software that other proprietary systems did not have. This, of course, was a result of freedom, but freedom was not what made my decision.”
Mindquarry will generate profits through a subscription model through which customers receive maintenance and support. “For our enterprise customers this removes another barrier: uncertainty when dealing with community-created software.” Mindquarry is also available in a hosted version where small companies can, for a fee, take advantage of a pre-installed version of Mindquarry that resides on remote servers.
Trieloff says the idea of community is the most important aspect of launching a business based on open source. “If you are using open source software internally on mission-critical systems, or starting a company on this software, make sure to be involved in the community,” he says. He also cautions that “the community that creates large parts of the software must be understood to keep your requirements and the development in sync. Without your contribution, the community will hardly create the software you need.”
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