I have been watching the Quickr space for a little while now, and also looking at the related templates by SNAPP's. I have come to the conclusion that without a financial incentive, open source/freeware can be a very risky proposition. Take for example the work that the SNAPPS guys are doing.

I was quite impressed with the effort when it was launched. No small feat, and it did something that I found useful and provides Quickr with desperately needed functionality and a facelift as well. Then as time has marched on, and more than 20 point releases later, "release burnout" is starting to have an effect on the timeliness of releases of the freeware.

Now we're at Quickr 8.1 and there is no official announcement on the SNAPP's Template site about any plans or any schedule for release of 8.1 certified templates. Only compatibility with 8.0.0.2. I did manage to find these 3 entries here, here and here on the Lotus Quickr forum's.

Not to disparage the hard work that Viktor and Rob are doing, but if I was a CIO and wanting to see the value of the SNAPP's templates with Quickr, I would have to also be prepared to accept the risk that I may be stuck in a version of Quickr for an unspecified period before certification to the next version is announced. So where would that leave me if there is a critical patch needed to be installed on my Quickr server, and am already using Quickr and the templates. Do I install the patch and live with the side effects until SNAPP's get to it ? Or do I let my users suffer until it's all ready ? Not a great position to be in is it ? Because as you know, moving data around within Quickr is no easy task. So all you can do is test, test and do more testing before you release freeware as part of your solution to the business.

But IBM aren't really helping much here either. If there is an official endorsement by IBM to the SNAPP's guys about being design partners, SNAPP's should expect a commitment to a closer relationship from IBM, at least in the form of advance notice of a release schedule from IBM, and access to alpha code as some kind of heads up about upcoming releases. At least that will reduce the lead time to fixing the templates in a controlled manner, rather than being reactive as it hits the market without much notice. But then again, how much demand can you put on people who are working to give you free stuff anyway ?