Since starting my IT career in the ’90s, I’ve seen how open standards (http, html, javascript) and open source technologies (Linux, mysql, perl, php) have pushed humanity fast forward to the future.

Today, open source is king and the once rulers of the closed software world are now irrelevant with levels of innovation close to null.

As an hardcore open source advocate, I woke up one morning and realized that my mission was done. I didn’t need to push open source in businesses as even the smallest ones knew what MySQL or WordPress was.

Web and open standards are the norm for all new applications businesses would uses.

So, is it all good?

Well, technology has changed in 15 years. It moved from personal computers to the cloud. Personal and business information that once was on your own computer is now on servers [spread] all over the world.

Servers are much more reliable than your own computer and often more secure, so they will do a better job at keeping your information.

So, with the cloud is it definitely all good?

Yes, except you do not own your information. Naturally, all those new services have emerged as closed standards.

As an individual, you may not care that you do not own your data on Facebook or Twitter, but as a business you should care about all your data being locked up by an online service.

What if Intuit, Google Docs, Constant Contact, Freshbooks, Harvest, Basecamp or Highrise went offline? What will you do when they will increase their fees by 200%?

The answer is nothing, there is nothing you can do. The invoices, documents, mailing lists and projects you create and manage are not yours as long as they are locked in your service provider’s system.

We have created Ofuz to give businesses their data back.

Ofuz works by giving you a choice on where you want your business data to be hosted. It guarantees you that the application that runs your business will be available forever.

You can use Ofuz on the cloud and benefits from its convenience, but we are also an open source project, which mean Ofuz is available for download and can be installed and hosted by a third party or on your own server.

You can export all your account data and re-import them on your own self-hosted version of Ofuz whenever you want.

If Ofuz ever goes out of business, the application will still be available and chances are that our open source community will keep improving it.

WordPress also follows that same principal and dozens of other new open source projects are coming up offering that same freedom and ownership of your data.

A new open source revolution is starting and it will again spur innovation and move us forward.

We’re wrapping up our three-part series on how to create a free squeeze page using Ofuz with two screencasts, walking you through the process step-by-step.

Creating a squeeze page on a free Blogger.com account:

Creating a squeeze page on a self-hosted WordPress blog:

Thanks for tuning in, and be sure to get a free Ofuz account to take advantage of over 90 enhancements, just released in Ofuz 0.5.8!

I got the chance to make the first public presentation of Ofuz last week.
It was at LaWebMo meetup: http://www.lawebmo.com/
The feedback was great, and got interesting questions.

It was a 5 minutes presentation so I concentrated on the main features.
Here are the slides: