Alexei (on his new blog) announces EBA's first open source release.

Today we quietly open sourced EBA FTP Sync, a COM based file synchronization tool that more than a few people are using to perform tasks like automated backups. The neat thing about FTP Sync was always that we packaged it as a web tool… perform FTP synchronization from a web app.. neat idea.

We used it ourselves for years in our commercial CMS, which was a fairly elegant solution to the problem of migrating content efficiently between staging and production servers.

We’ve decided that the component would be of more use to people if it shipped with the source code.. we thought about lowering the price and then remembered that we’re an Ajax company and had no business selling ActiveX tools in the first place!

I met Andre Charland, head of eBusiness Apps about a year ago when I gave a talk at VanDEV about open source and your business. He teases us at Bryght about being a crazy open source company and I tease him about being Mr. Proprietary. It's great to see the team at EBA dipping their toes into the water of open source.

[Part of a series about some of the cool people I met at OSCON and Portland 2005 Drupal Conference]

It's unbelievable how somebody so young can get so much done. I miss Andy (and his Drupal modules like the pants module and the sxip module). We need more Web 2.0 companies in Vancouver so Andy can come back for all the right reasons. Flock is going to be a success because they've hired developers like Andy. Andy eat more, drink less, code more, and of course continue to have fun!