When Emily Huang and I started Rivet in 2003, we wanted to do something completely fresh and different. We knew we wanted to create business software that focused on the emergence of global standards such as XBRL and IFRS. We knew we could make a big impact and help drive a distinct paradigm—maybe even tectonic—shift where technology is (finally) being utilized to make it both fast and easy to achieve greater transparency and accuracy in financial reporting and communication.

But we also wanted to embrace the community and social capabilities of Web 2.0, and new software delivery capabilities such as Software as a Service. And with XML, XBRL and IFRS all being open standards, Open Source software seemed to make a lot of sense for building on open standards.

At its core, XBRL is highly complex, and most XBRL software companies—and the software they created—were very technical. Because of this, the first product Rivet released was an XBRL document creation product named Dragon Tag^® which was designed specifically for non-technical accounting and finance users. This was an expensive product to develop, and although we considered an open source license, we weren’t quite sure. But we did want to encourage growth of the XBRL community, so we started selling the product for a very low price (about $300), with a 90-day free trial.

We subsequently created a very robust desktop XBRL viewer that provided a non-technical way to view, print, and export XBRL taxonomies and instance documents. This product, the Dragon View XBRL Viewer, was made available as a free download from the Rivet website.

Both products proved to be very popular, but we were still very interested in creating a community product that many people could enhance and promote even more widely. The idea of an open source product was very compelling, but there were several questions about whether it would be effective. There were at least three things that discouraged us: The primary reason was size of the market; there were thousands of people involved in the XBRL initiative, but successful open source products were typically used by hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of users. The second concern was that, since this was a Microsoft Excel and Word add-in, it was written in C# for the Microsoft .Net platform. Because .Net isn’t Open Source, it doesn’t have wide support in the Open Source community. And lastly, this was a business product, and not something many hobbyist’s would be interested in, so the community would probably come from business software vendors, who are not typically open source vendors. In fact, we weren’t even sure business customers would use Open Source products.

We frequently asked other companies investing in XBRL software if they would be open to a community project, and the answer was always a shrug and a maybe. But we did find an enthusiastic participant in the Securities and Exchange Commission. Christopher Cox, then the SEC Chairman, was a huge supporter of XBRL and we demonstrated our XBRL analysis and reporting solutions to him back in 2005. The SEC decided to fund the development of an XBRL viewer for the SEC web site. Rivet proposed an Open Source Web Viewer to the SEC based on our Dragon View product. They loved the idea, and we delivered that viewer (and three subsequent projects) with Open Source licenses.

In early 2008–four years after Dragon Tag was released—we still couldn’t determine if there was any significant XBRL community interest in contributing to a common project. But we decided to take the leap and release Dragon Tag and Dragon View with Open Source licenses. Our hope was to forego revenue from commodity products in exchange for increased interest in our other products, including our analysis and reporting solution, CrossFire^® Analyst.

Rivet has invested millions of dollars in the six releases of Dragon Tag and Dragon View, and we were now planning to give it away (at least, that’s how it felt to some of us). But that was only the start; not only would we contribute our intellectual property, but soon discovered that we still had a substantial investment ahead to support Open Source. Selecting a license is difficult and expensive; the issues are so complex that we even hired a consulting firm to assist us (Olliance Group). We assigned resources to assist the community, and we posted fixes to the site. Preparing the code, posting to SourceForge.com, and responding to questions all took much more effort than we anticipated.

We posted the source code and compiled versions of the products to SourceForge in April 2008 (followed by another release in July). This was the full version of the products with the ability to validate, review, and to merge Excel and Word documents into a single XBRL Document.

We wanted to learn, and events in this past year taught us a lot:

• The business consumers we dealt with seem to have little interest in open source. They want a license, support, and a throat to choke; they want solutions, not software. They want a strong provider of those solutions, and they’re willing to pay for it.
• We haven’t had any substantial feedback except from a couple of software vendors and service providers. They were interested in modifying and distributing the code, but were not interested in supporting a community effort.
• This year I’ve spoken with at least six software vendors in the XBRL space about sharing and open development efforts. They are all reinventing commodity software, so why not share the burden? Now that someone else has committed, would they support a community website that allows users to share taxonomies, financial statements, etc? How about developing a community file format to store all info necessary to build an Instance Document? Use Dragon Tag as the foundation for a standardized Instance Document builder that anyone can use (rather than everyone building the same thing)? I received some murmurs of interest, but no one was interested in following through.
• There have been over 1000 downloads of Rivet code from SourceForge, but only 14 posts on the forum. Surprisingly, there has been very little feedback from anyone—good or bad.
• Late in 2008, the SEC contracted with a software vendor to supply a validation engine for SEC filings. The vendor did not want to make the project open source, so the SEC acquiesced. No open source validation.
• Rivet’s Dragon Tag investment continued to grow. The SEC added many new requirements for XBRL filers and the latest user guide has required us to make over forty substantial changes to Dragon Tag, requiring hundreds of additional hours of development time. When we add QA, training, and additional support, this will grow to thousands of hours over the next year.
• After experiencing the major changes brought about by SEC XBRL requirements and awareness of future changes to accommodate new requirements—not to mention conversion to IFRS , we know that creating and viewing XBRL documents is far from a commodity activity. In fact, Dragon Tag provides unique value that sets it distinctly apart from other products and offers considerable value to end users.

So we feel like we finally have some answers and a conclusion. It has only been a year, but the market really doesn’t seem to have any interest in building a community at this time. Add to this our increasing investment in the products, and the dearth of any other Open Source support (Et tu, SEC?) and it becomes clear that it doesn’t make sense for Rivet to continue to contribute to open source products.

The current versions of Dragon Tag and Dragon View—along with the four SEC web projects—will remain in Open Source, but for the foreseeable future, Rivet products will only be released with traditional proprietary licenses.

Could we have done more to make this a success? Maybe so, but it takes resources to promote a product—even an Open Source one. We could have given this more time also, but the problem is the same. The current global financial crisis requires all companies to intensify their focus on both revenue and cost. So I bid Hasta La Vista to Open Source rather than Adiós, because we may see you again someday. Only time will tell whether Open Source has a place in the business software world.