Sam Varghese
Thursday, 14 February 2008 20:31
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
This doesn't mean that Zymaris is some other-worldly being who sports saffron-coloured robes and avoids meat. The ponytail notwithstanding (that's something he's acquired in the last few years), he is a shrewd businessman, extremely good at cultivating clients and keeping them on his rolls. (To some extent, he resembles a somewhat portly version of Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems.)
What is particularly refreshing about Zymaris is the fact that he isn't one of the Taliban types who are becoming more and more common in the FOSS arena - the ones who subscribe to the same "you-are-with-us-or-you-are-against-us" school of thought as George the younger and the mullahs in Afghanistan.
No, Zymaris is a well-educated, broadminded person who talks openly about things to journalists, knows when to ask for things to be off the record (fully aware that his confidences will be respected) and avoids spin like the plague. He also speaks with authority as he has been around longer than most in this field.
The company recently released under the GPL some software which it has been using internally - the choice of name is
allocPSA . Zymaris explains that the "alloc" bit stands for allocating tasks and the PSA for professional services automation. (He's not amused when I tell him that the name violates Debian policy!)
The software, he explains, is designed to assist services-based businesses to manage people, projects and billing. It is written in PHP plus some shell scripts. It can be used to manage resource planning, project management, time and expenses, integration with existing invoicing, book-keeping and payroll systems, issue tracking, while-you-were-out messages, announcements, reminders, knowledge management, collaboration, services supply chain, human resources and staff skilling and management of cost-centres. Version 1.4 was recently released - the licence is the Affero GPL which was designed to cover the loopholes in GPLv2, lacunae which were taken care of in GPLv3.
