The problem here isn’t with the industry, or with the open source model. It is with Farelogix’s poor choice of license for the environment and their goals.

I think your comments — “travel is a huge, hyper-competitive market with large segments trying to undermine or eliminate other large segments and vice versa” gets at the heart of the issue about what happened to Hawkeye. Competitors are loathe to cooperate on a point of sale tool even if collaboration would move the industry forward.

To clarify, my remarks in Miami were intended as a compliment to Farelogix for taking an open, collaborative approach with SPRK. By bringing the Industry Best partners together around the product, they are providing a better solution than if they tried to do everything on their own. As far as Hawkeye goes, I don’t recall ever mentioning it and honestly have little visibility into how successful it has been or will be.

Regarding the travel industry, I believe I said an open, collaborative approach to solving problems isn’t the norm. While there are exceptions like Open Travel Alliance, I have found “trench warfare” and “mutually assured destruction” to be more common strategies in my 10+ years in the industry.

Let’s face it, travel is a huge, hyper-competitive market with large segments trying to undermine or eliminate other large segments and vice versa. I don’t think these comments constitute “industry bashing”. This dynamic is actually what keeps the industry interesting and why so many of us are addicted to pursuing it’s many opportunities.

Gregg Brockway, President, TripIt

- market (this is already a part of it, but even though i’m aware of flx, i wasn’t aware of hawkeye, probably give it a catchier, more travel-related name in the process…)
- distribute (link directly to the sf.net download for potential users)
- simplify (successful os developments do not have such an expansive requirement list, most of them simply need an operating system and at most other open source files, from what i can see this could be ported as well)
- engage (communicate with potential users, not let people’s posts to the sf.net board unanswered)

personally, i don’t know many open source products for travel tech. although you can use open source to work with your data and inventory, the distribution so far always costs (very high implementation certification and connection fees which make it very difficult for entrants from developing countries, even for less-funded ventures, to start out) too much.

And yes, Hawkeye developers do need a few common development tools. As stated on our website:
Required Development Tools
Hawkeye requires the following developer tools that are not included in the download:

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
If you don’t already have it, this can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=333325FD-AE52-4E35-B531-508D977D32A6&displaylang=en

Telerik RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX
If you don’t already have it, this can be obtained from http://www.telerik.com. You will need to either purchase a developer license or download a trial version. Hawkeye uses version 2008.3.1105.35

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008
Required for de-bugging. If you don’t already have it, this can be purchased from http://www.microsoft.com or a number of other sites.

BTW – Telerik is used to make the display of content more productive through the use of matrix, pull-downs, etc. Otherwise it could end up looking like a GDS green screen.

The Knight Foundation, which has an annual contest to fund open source news startups, has had varying levels of success, and may be a good place to solicit suggestions on how to spur adoption.

The key is patience. A former associate of mine, Marc Ewing, evangelized open source Linux for eight years before he found success as the founding CTO of Red Hat.

Successful open source initiatives – Joomla, Firefox, Drupal, MediaWiki, PHPbb – tend to offer solutions in information management and presentation, generally not in specific business processes like point-of-sale.

And my developer friends tell me Hawkeye required a specific development environment and set of tools, limiting its reach to those who had experience with (and who paid a fair amount of money for licenses for) those tools.

Our own initiative at OpenTravel keeps us well above the process fray, as we provide connectivity for inventory control, not a back-office application. And because we create XML schema that can be utilized in any technical environment and managed with a variety of tools, just about any company that isn’t tied to EDIFACT can implement our schema.

Don’t get me wrong – providing open standards solutions to an industry as competitive (and as ridden with legacy technology) as travel is no walk in the park. Even with offering just XML connectivity solutions I get pushback (after all, every company thinks their own API is best), but the thousands of companies that have participated in our work groups and project teams, not to mention the thousands of companies that have actually implemented our schema, tell me that the industry can work together on open source projects, provided the scope of the initiative is realistic.

It may very well be that Jim Davidson is ahead of his time and in three years, Hawkeye will be all over the map, especially if the suppliers actively embrace more open ways of doing business.

Ouch! Biting the hand that feeds.