Optaros

[Christopher Schmidt]

I received an email today from a recruiter mentioning Optaros
(http://www.optaros.com/). I've never heard of the company before, but
they look pretty slick: It's the first instance I've seen of a company
basically doing what I think is a great idea: taking open source
solutions, finding the best solution for a particular problem, and
acting as support staff for that solution.

At my previous employer (wedu, inc.) we did something similar, but it
was simply done as it was the most cost efficient way of managing our
goals. For example, when setting up a calendar for people, we wouldn't
generate the calendar display by hand: we used phpicalendar
(http://phpicalendar.net/) for the display, and simply wrote an
administration tool for creating the icalendar files that it needed via
a web interface.

However, we did not use this as a selling point to the customer (in part
because the bill reflected amount of time to develop such an application
internally, despite the fact that we were using a prebuilt solution).
I'm not sure whether this would have made a difference in our client
base: as it was, many of our clients came to us first for print or
marketing services, and received advice or a requested a website design
or tool as part of that marketing plan. 

Are there lots of open source consulting firms around? Do they do good
things for the community? In web applications, GPL compatibility
requirements are pretty slim: since in many cases, you're not
redistributing the software (you're running it yourself) there's no need
to contribute back changes. Do some people take the time to push changes
upstream? What do people think about this type of business (consulting
on open source) in general?

Has anyone ever heard of Optaros? Are they good people? I'm honestly not
sure I'm looking for a new position in the short term -- I'm working for
Ning (the new PHP development framework/"playground") atm, and loving
that, but I'm still interested in seeing what's out there.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt