Obliquid was first released as free software in July 2002. Obliquid is also the name of a software firm and an Internet provider. The name of the project was chosen to be the same as our company name because it's our main project and most of our customers' site are built around it. Our typical customers are medium to big sized firms that require organizational consultancies and custom solutions, more than a boxed product. We decided to release it as free software for a very simple reason: there was no reasons against it, no reasons to keep it secret.
The first result of releasing it as free software was to force us to make Obliquid cleaner and more organized. A programmer writes messy code from time to time, to meet impossible deadlines or for just being lazy. But he/she will be very ashamed of it, if other programmers look at it. Going open source the whole world can read your code. Scary. We rewrote it from scratch while improving the features of our previous engine.
In a second phase we started to receive bug reports from a wider user base. Bug reports help us to improve Obliquid, because we can fix any bug reported, but we can't fix bugs that we don't know about.
The next phase has just started: we are receiving translations and help from programmers to improve Obliquid. Obliquid was built with multilanguage support from the very beginning, because we are located in Italy and releasing it in Italian only would have been an unwise move. Moreover we've already built sites in Chinese and Japanese for our customers, and we are aware of the problems posed by different character encodings. Obliquid uses UTF-8 encoding which is safe for nearly all the languages of the world. Programmers are also starting to help and join the team to be part of this adventure.
The Obliquid developers' group now goes beyond Obliquid and so any of the active developers is the most qualified person available to give professional support and to customize Obliquid for specific needs. Beyond the free support anyone can receive on the forum, Obliquid firm can offer professional pay support, customizations, hosting or housing for your site.