Based in Christchurch, OnlineGroups.Net is a joint venture between two privately held New Zealand companies, GroupSense and IOPEN Technologies and has been in business for the last three years. It is self-funded and generates consulting, support and and development income from clients like Advanced Business Education in New Zealand, and E-­Democracy.Org in Minnesota.

GroupServer has been in development since 2003; it has been offered as a service which was in beta in 2006 and left this development stage this year to coincide with the release of the source. (The demo site is here)

Projects director Dan Randow says GroupServer's main purpose is to provide email lists with a web forum interface that support file-sharing and chat. "We aim to achieve the equivalence between the email and web interfaces that Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups have. The difference is that you can create email groups on a site that you can manage," he said.

As a GroupServer installation integrates Zope, PostgreSQL, Postfix and Apache and can deal with millions of emails daily, administration is not exactly trivial.

Randow, who has worked in the technology sector since 1988, said the company had decided to release the source now for a few reasons. "We made a couple of releases of version 0.9, but, even though we were running our production sites on it, that version had various limitations that constrained widespread deployment," he said.

"Since version 0.9, GroupServer has undergone major changes in maintainability. Almost all of the code, and interface templates now reside in the file-system, rather than in Zope's object database. In addition, the technical architecture is significantly more modular than it was in 0.9. This means that a production installation can be maintained much more easily."