Best Buy Releases Idea-Gathering App Under Open Source Licence

Best Buy announced this week that the company is releasing its idea-gathering software, BBYIDX, under the GNU General Public License. Written in Ruby, the application is designed to collect ideas for new products or services, and let users post, tag, or comment on them. Administrators can further modify and edit incoming ideas, as well as assign them to teams or team members.See it in action at Best Buy IdeaX.

According to the project's Web site, the decision to open source BBYIDX was an easy one. "Open source, in most cases and especially for this kind of project simply feels right to us. The vitality, adaptability and flexibility of a project depends on input, on evolution. Open source is protection against the forces of entropy that threaten this vitality. Indeed, innovation itself works better when many minds can consider the problem from the myriad angles represented by a community. The Best Buy IdeaX site is set up as an instance of the BBYIDX project, as such we'll be submitting our changes to it as well."

 This kind of crowdsourcing platform is a terrific way to get input from a project's user community on a small scale as well as a way for enterprise to gather data from its customers for the purposes of product improvement. Check out the source code or contact the project's developers for more information.