OpenX Blog

We’ve been getting quite a lot of feedback and comments the last few days, on the back of the announcement that we’ve raised funding.

Here’s the comment that has interested me most, which was posted on TechCrunch:

Well, then that explains why they haven’t released all the features that users have been begging for over the years like self-signup and PayPal integration. I’m guessing we’ll all have to pay for those features instead of getting them in the OS package. If so, I do hope they crash and burn as all of the support users have given them over the years was to make a better product for all, not to feed ideas for their own startup.

I’ve talked about the evolution of Openads before on our forums, but perhaps it’s a good idea to reiterate a few points, just so that people know where we’re coming from.

I’ve been working on the Openads 2.3 code base for a little over 3 years now - but in a rather circuitous way. When I started, the company I was working for was called Awarez, later renamed to m3, and we were writing something called Max Media Manager, or MMM for short.

MMM was forked from phpAdsNew about 12 months before I joined Awarez, for a very specific purpose - to meet the needs of Awarez’s parent company, Unanimis. So, that’s what we had in mind when we added features to MMM - what does Unanimis need? After all, Unanimis were paying the bills, so we worked on what they needed.

As MMM had come from the open source phpAdsNew, we wanted to give something back to the open source community, if we could - so we kept MMM open source, we made occasional releases, and the staff of Awarez/m3 pitched in whenever they could to help out anyone brave enough to use the incredibly complex and undocumented code base that MMM became over the years. We didn’t have to do this - Unanimis didn’t stand to gain anything from this, after all - but we wanted to.

Of course, the people who used phpAdsNew or MMM requested new features - and self sign-up and PayPal integration are certainly high on the list of most requested. But Unanimis had no need for these features, and we just didn’t have the time in between doing what Unanimis needed us to do for them to put those features into MMM - and with Matteo Beccati as the only person who was volunteering their time to manage the phpAdsNew project, unfortunately the features weren’t able to be put into phpAdsNew, either.

In time, we came to realise that was an opportunity to form a company around the open source products of phpAdsNew and MMM. So, we formed Openads Limited, and we managed to convince Matteo to join forces with us, and now, together, we’ve renamed phpAdsNew as Openads 2.0, and MMM as Openads 2.3.

So, I can understand why people might be asking, “where are the features we’ve requested?” I can understand that they think we’ve had a secret evil master plan all this time to deliberately keep features out of the product so that we can now charge for those features. However, that’s not the truth. Openads the company has only been working, full time, on writing software for you, the open source community, for six months now, and that whole time has been spent working on making sure Openads 2.3 gets the clean up it needs to be released as a solid, stable, fast and well documented successor to the long running and outstandingly successful phpAdsNew (now Openads 2.0) software.

However, as hard as we’ve been working for the last six months on this, we’re not satisfied. The progress we’re making is not fast enough. We want Openads to be better, sooner - but there’s only so much a small team can do in a day. We need to grow our development team if we want Openads to improve more quickly, and to add all those new features people request. To do that, we need money to hire developers. That’s why we raised funds - so we can get more developers on board, and make Openads not just good, but great.

So, we hope that over the next six months, you’ll see the difference from the funding. We’ve heard your requests for features in the past - and we’ve received hundreds of emails over the last couple of days. We’re listening, just like we always have - except that now, our focus is on your needs, and so we’re planning how we can best fit those needs into our development roadmap for Openads right now.