Happy Open Source Birthday, Terracotta

We went open source one year ago yesterday. The difference between this year and last year has been astounding. There are a lot of reasons why being an open source company is better than not being an open source company, but the most important for me is the ability to say, "If you don't believe that it does what we say it does, feel free to download it, try it out, and look at the code to see how we do it--and don't pay us a dime until you actually get value out of the thing."

Indeed, there are very few extreme skeptics out there anymore; certainly nothing like the early days when we would tell people what Terracotta does and they would look at us incredulously like we were speaking some crazy moon language.

On a warm and fuzzy note, after years of using open source technology in a commercial context, it's very rewarding to be able to put something of value back into the open source community. Also, it has been a pleasure to work as a peer with the many other open source communities that we've integrated with, e.g., Wicket, Jetty, Maven, Geronimo, Liferay, Red5 (there are more, but those are the ones that I've had personal involvement with).

So... happy open source birthday, Terracotta.