I noticed that JumpBox has hosted wikis (mediawiki, docuwiki, moinmoin), blogs (wordpress, movable type) project management (projectpier, trac, redmine), bug tracking (bugzilla, mantis), monitoring (nagios/cacti, zenoss) and version control (subversion) tools.
Which means that you could get a jumpbox (or combination of jumpboxes) and do what the core of a QA Site does. Which means, in one sense, that there’s competition, of a sort, but in another sense, that there’s a demand for these hosted applications.
They don’t have them all put together in one package, though they soon might, but they don’t have a dashboard and integration. That’s what a QA Site will provide, and it may very well be an open source wrapper project the way WAMP provides an Apache + Mysql + PHP development package for Windows. So I’m not too worried there.
Jumpbox may even have interest in hosting QA Site packages, with a version control, bug tracking, project management, documentation, (and possibly even continuous integration and test case management) tools. Or I might use JumpBoxes as a basis for QA Sites.
The value I’m proposing isn’t the installation and hosting of these apps, but the expertise in using them together. Hosting is sort of a loss leader, or easy entryway. I expect downloaded VMWare & Xen appliances to be a logical progressive step from hosting, or an alternative for more tech-savvy organizations, and on-site full installations to be the greater demand.
In truth I have some trepidation about getting burdened with too much hosting responsibility and being required to spend more time than I’d like administering installations, and less time developing testing solutions.
So is Jumpbox more of a competitor or potential collaborator? Or, does it really just help grow the open source QA tools pie?
JumpBox is providing virtual machine building blocks that you could potentially use as the foundation for a different kind of service. If you’re primary goal is providing trials of open source applications then that’s something that would probably be competitive, but if your goal is really on QA/testing solutions and providing services around that, then I would look to JumpBox more as a resource. You might even consider becoming a reseller and leaving the install/maintenance of the applications to us.
BTW, JumpBox definitely isn’t a hosting service. You could use JumpBoxes to build a hosting service and you can run JumpBoxes on Amazon EC2 but JumpBox isn’t selling hosting.
Kimbro-
Thanks for the clarification. I realized as I thought more about
Jumpbox that it might actually be a good base to build on. I’m
defintely envious of the VM, and wish I could harness Jumpbox’s skills
there. Having a “QA site” VM download is a distant “todo” on my list,
though probably the best marketing proposition I could make.
-Aaron