When Dave and I set up Curverider a couple of years ago, the response was lukewarm. Elgg, as an open source product, was supposed to be free, wasn’t it? What was a commercial company doing with it? Did that mean it wasn’t going to be open source any more? Rumours flew round the e-learning blogosphere faster than we could stamp them out.
Today, we announced that Curverider has attracted investment (here’s Dave’s comment), and I’m kind of expecting the same thing to happen. In fact, this is going to herald a new chapter in Elgg development; a new chapter that is still resolutely open source, licensed under the GPL, and committed to open standards.
Curverider provides commercial support, as well as customisation and consultancy services. Through a partner arrangement, we also provide hosting for your Elgg environment. Because of the way this works, Elgg is free: it’s always been available to the community, and it always will be. However, the money from related services allows us to work full time on it, and even hire new programmers to join our team.
We’re a rare breed: a British web startup that’s received investment. One that deals with open source and free, open standards is rare even in Silicon Valley. With this announcement, we’re not only here to stay (we were sustainable anyway), but you can expect us to become bolder and more ambitious. Watch this space.
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