As many of you guys know, The Werken Company as a hopefully-viable commercial venture, is pretty new. You may also be familiar with our various open-source projects.

We've had the extremely good luck to have some of our development sponsored by Zenplex, a company that uses, supports and produces open-source software.

So, I'm wondering how many of you guys know you have a need for a rules engine, or a workflow engine, or whatever else we're churning out here at Werken. How many of you have done any sort of cost/benefit analysis comparing building in-house, licensing a commercial offering, or supporting an open-source project?

Ideally, I'd like to have our open-source projects treated as sort of a venture fund. Many organizations with a need for rules, workflow, or whatnot could contribute dollars towards the development. Sure, development continues without sponsors, but sponsors get their use-cases considered quicker, their bugs fixed faster, and their voices heard more often in general.

I know the now-defunct SourceXchange attempted something similar, but lacked the coherent organization of developers by instead simply hooking random developers with random sponsors. I think we're different as we have a history, code you can inspect, projects that are already underway, and a developer headcount greater than one (there's three of us werkers, now).

Would your organization be interested in sharing the costs of development of these infrastructure pieces with others and support the open-source community at the same time?