The fundamental question for a software company whose core technology is open source is "How are you going to make money?" This article describes Appscio's objectives and strategies for its open source community, its commercial business and the relationship between them. Several other articles on this site discuss the core problems we're addressing and the concepts and features of the technology.
Appscio's fundamental objectives are:
- To make the Appscio™ MPF the defacto standard semantic media framework for academics, institutional researchers, commercial vendors and customers who develop or utilize media algorithms, and
- To make Appscio a successful vendor of applications and services based on the Appscio™ MPF technology and algorithms licensed from centers of excellence around the world.
Open Source Community
Two keys to establishing the Appscio™ MPF as a defacto standard are: 1) to make it open source, and 2) base it upon the most mature and respected Linux media framework available: GStreamer. By making the Appscio™ MPF open, free and easily obtained we hope to encourage rapid adoption by the thousands of algorithm developers who today must assemble or write their own media framework and who cannot easily leverage the work of others.
Basing it on GStreamer makes the hundreds of CODECs and GStreamer elements immediately available to those same developers. Dual licensing the Appscio™ MPF code allows both open source and proprietary algorithms to be distributed with the appropriate rights and protections.
To guide Appscio and help spread the word about this project. Appscio recruited a highly respected Technical Advisory Board consisting of senior academics, former government leaders and leading industry technologists. We are also actively working with high profile algorithm developers to port a critical mass of open source and proprietary, audio/video semantic algorithms to the Framework. Our goal is to make available hundreds of the most useful, best-of-breed algorithms in the coming months.
In the Algorithms section of this section, we'll describe our roadmap for this "catalog" of algorithms and progress on porting them. We'd like your suggestions and/or help in this part of the project.
Appscio's Business
In parallel with sponsoring this community, Appscio is building a profitable business. The company makes money by licensing, hardening, testing, documenting and supporting proprietary algorithms, building proprietary applications and services using them and delivering solutions to government and commercial customers.
Appscio's does not develop media algorithms itself. Instead, our strategy is to develop relationships with the thousands of algorithm developers around the world who are at the forefront of speech and computer vision research. Guided by our Advisors and customer input, Appscio will license algorithms developed by academics, research labs and commercial vendors. When needed algorithms haven't yet been developed, Appscio and its customers may sponsor research resulting in new algorithms.
The complete (to the extent we've gone public with it) direction and focus of Appscio's commercial and government business can be found in the Solutions section of the company site.