I spent a productive hour with Krugle yesterday, meeting with a few members of management: Steve Larsen (CEO), Laura Merling (VP, Business Development - yes, that Laura Merling), and Ken Krugler (CTO). I have to admit: I went into the meeting with low expectations. In Ken's words, I figured a vertical search engine focused on open source and development might be interesting, but not useful (with "use" translating into dollars).
I was wrong.
First off, Krugle is more than a vertical search engine. It does that, and it does it extremely well. Krugle aggregates the many and various open source software repositories (Sourceforge being just one of them), indexes them, and makes them easily, productively searchable. So, if I know I need a utility to convert documents to PDFs, or need a special library to do X, Y, or Z, I can easily find it using Krugle.
Even more interestingly, once I find the code itself, as well as relevant how-tos, I can actually select this grouping of tabs in Krugle and email a link of that composite of information to someone. So, if I'm trying to show a friend, customer, partner, or whomever how to integrate JasperSoft with OpenOffice, it becomes super-easy to aggregate that information, package it, and send it over to someone as a unified URL. Nice.
I would argue that as Krugle grows and improves, it will become as critical to development as the IDE. There will simply be no reason to not facilitate development using Krugle.
Keep in mind, however, that Krugle is not relegated to the airy confines of the uber-elite developers. Krugle is something that system administrators or casual developers/programmers can use to get their jobs done. Krugle provides access to the world of code samples, tech notes, etc. that can help someone get their job done, e.g., I'm a system administrator that knows I need something for my Linux installations to facilitate monitoring of those servers. I go into Krugle, type in a relevant search, and up pops relevant projects and their descriptions (as well as licensing information, strength of the project measured in active developers, downloads, comments from other developers, etc.), code from various projects that I can immediately drop in, tech notes that describe how others have done the same thing, etc.
It's like having the entire world of open source on your hard drive. Quickly accessible.
So, that's search. Where I think Krugle gets even more useful is as a tech support option. Krugle centralizes forum/wiki/etc. support for the world of open source projects, giving users a one-stop shop for Alfresco, SugarCRM, JasperSoft, MySQL, etc. (online) support. Krugle takes it a step further, however, and allows its users to add comments to the support pages ("Follow steps 1-4, but instead of 5, reboot and type "XXXXX" into the command line"). Krugle thereby enables user-generated support pages and enriches the support of both project-based and company-based open source products.
There's more, but this is getting a bit long. The short of it is that Krugle is doing some exciting things relative to open source search, development, and support. Done right, Krugle should become a central aspect of open source development going forward.
P.S. My biggest question going into the meeting was how Krugle plans to make money. The immediate answer is "advertising," but the longer-term, more interesting answer is many and varied. Tech companies (proprietary or open source) should consider Krugle to beef up and improve their developer support (or just technical support) offerings. That's just one OEM possibility - I can see several others. I can also see enterprise IT licensing Krugle as a natural complement to their development tools.
Posted by Matt Asay on July 20, 2006 07:42 AM
