AJAX Photo Sharing Site Zoto Goes Open Source
Zoto is a highly regarded photo sharing site with lots of AJAX, social features and blogging plug-ins. It's been getting good write ups since Om Malik covered it in 2004. Late last year the company switched to a paid-only account model (like Smugmug) and last week it put the codebase up on the Google Code open source repository. Non-commercial use is free and commercial licenses are available.
Is this a sign of Zoto's immanent demise? Possibly, but in a world with lots of niche photo sharing sites, there may be no meta-lessons to learn here. At the very least, there's some very nice photo sharing software now available for use on your site.
In a 2006 comparison of photo sharing sites, our own Alex Iskold called Zoto "very well designed, [with] the most social web features." To be fair, the site's aesthetics could be improved, but perhaps you can do that now on your own server. It really is quite feature-rich.
In these "everything must be free" times, it's interesting that no one but the CEO has written about Zoto's latest move. It's move to a paid model was heavily criticized. Pete Cashmore, for example, wrote about it in a February 2007 post titled "How to Lose Your Users and Kill Your Web 2.0 Company: Zoto."
Open sourcing your software, asking for paid commercial use and offering users only paid accounts sounds like a reasonable business plan to me. Those steps alone are certainly not enough to kill a company. A lack of follow-through, marketing and community management could do that - and there are indications that Zoto is guilty of all three of those shortcomings. Maybe one of you brilliant cynics out there can do a better job with it on your own server.
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Anyone else notice this:
"The server and the rest of the Zoto code base is now free for non-commercial use. If you want to use Zoto's software in a commercial, for-profit environment, you can contact Kord Campbell at kordless@gmail.com, to inquire about licensing options for commercial applications."
That doesn't really work with the license they have selected, and is a violation of the T&C of code.google.com, too. (Unless that's talking about some code which isn't on code.google.com)
"Free Software" doesn't mean free as in "free beer". It means it's open for inspection, free to read, free to share. It's not always free to run.
Section 8 of Google Code's TOS (on http://code.google.com/tos.html) basically says you can't resell their service. It isn't talking about the code or licenses you upload to their service. It's confusing because there are two TOS on their site, but I'm certain that they don't prevent you from charging for your software use. If I'm mistaken, please point me in the right direction.
The BSD license is one of the few licenses that actually allows a separate license to be placed on the same code. That means I could put a separate commercial license on Zoto later, as I mention on the page.
FWIW, it makes sense for someone to license the code from me if they are going to be using it in a commercial application. They might need install services, support, extra features added, etc., and it would be a requirement for them to use it.
For those of you looking to start your own site, install it yourself, add your own code, and help maintain the main codebase, it doesn't make any sense for me to put another license on it beyond the BSD one. Use it for free (as in free beer). I fully encourage it.
Please excuse the off-topic response. It is an attempt to get a missing CEO to visit home and deal with some domestic chores.
Over at the official Zoto webforum, a small group of users have been posting messages about their difficulties doing things like uploading photos, downloading photos, getting their login to work, making template changes. That much is normal. What’s not normal is that there have been no responses from anyone at Zoto for over a month. Not a word. No word of any kind. No routine communications. No mention of the news about going open source, for example. No news about the current situation and future prospects, nor about the cancellation of announced work.
Despite that absence, various Zoto users have found bits of information via other websites, such as Kord Campbell’s blog, designer kbarret’s blog, and miscellaneous reports at places like Splunk. While it is fairly clear that the company is not going under, it is clearly not functioning normally, which worries users.
Given the absence of communication on the home channels, the users who need help and reassurance are feeling that they’ve been deliberately cut adrift, ignored for some unknown reasons – or no reason at all.
What that means is that while the news about Zoto going open source might be cause for celebration for some people, it does nothing to explain the ongoing neglect of people who’ve paid to use a service and then found that it doesn’t work, and that nobody answers their queries.
While this might be relevant to the above story in its implications of Zoto’s ability to sustain their side of any deal, it is really analogous to the wife who has to haul her husband out of the pub in order to get the domestic chores done. It's an unusual measure, but apparently necessary...