Salesforce.Com & DimDim: Shame on You!

The new year is off to a banging M&A start with new tech deals being announced almost hourly. Yesterday saw Salesforce.com acquire open source/free web conferencing player DimDim for $31m. No sooner had the virtual inked dried on the announcement of the acquisition notices were received by DimDim users that their free accounts would be terminated effective March 15th.  Also Salesforce/DimDim announced that they will officially no longer support the open source/community version of the product. Way to go guys, NOT! Will someone please get them a copy of how to make friends and influence people. Or has Salesforce grown so arrogant that they don’t care anymore?

I use DimDim in my The CISO Group activities. It was a great service and we even I believe upgraded from the free to the low cost pay service to support the company. The fact is that since DimDim was acquired back in 2008 by another group they really haven’t done a great job of updating the open source version either. That is not and was not good. But I think not as many people were upset with it because they still offered the free version. Now both DimDim and Salesforce are showing their real regard for the community that made the product and the sale of the company possible.

I am personally miffed at this callousness, but I also believe in open source karma. I think what comes around, goes around and Salesforce.com will reap what they sow by this maneuver. Really thinking about it, Salesforce is going to offer this as a SaaS based solution anyway.  What would they lose by continuing the open source version? There are plenty of SaaS vendors who offer an opensource version for those who want to host it themselves. Hosting a web conferencing solution would not be easy in any event.  Fact is Salesforce would have lost little if anything by not cutting it off and on the other hand would have come out smelling like a rose on this deal.

Even if they were to eventually discontinue the open source and the free version, sending out the notice on the day the acquisition was announced?  Could they have waited a week or two? Talk about waiting for the body to grow cold.  That is just bad form and they deserve the bad PR for it.  

For those of you looking for open source or free web conferencing alternatives, here are a few from moodlenews.com:

Open source alternatives:

• https://www.bigbluebutton.org/ [Moodlenews coverage of BBB]
• https://code.google.com/p/openmeetings/

Other non-open source alternatives include,

• WiZiQ.com

I am sure that DimDim will be a great add on to the Salesforce offering. I am sure that Salesforce’s CRM competitors like SugarCRM will be adding web conferencing too.  Of course I am sure that adding in an open source web conferencing tool should not be too hard. In the meantime, fans of open source should let Salesforce know it takes more than open API to support open source. If they are not going to be friends of the open source community, maybe the open source community should not be friends of theirs.