Appcelerator launching open source AIR competitor

Appcelerator has also brought in new capital and begun collaborating with SpringSource as it continues to make progress following a move from Atlanta to Mountain View earlier this year.

I caught up with CEO Jeff Hainey Haynie yesterday, who said "we were able to do more in a day here than in a month from Atlanta," which is why the company headed west.

But Hainey Haynie was more anxious to talk about the future than the past, and how Titanium will bring new life to old desktop applications.

"Not every application will be well suited for this, but a large majority of desktop and browser applications can work well in this environment," Hainey Haynie said.

"Today we have a product for building browser based applications. Now we're extending it into desktop and mobile.

"Longer term you can use Appcelerator to build all those applications, and deploy them across all those systems. The same for the background. The SDK lets you pick and choose packing technologies – Java or PHP on the back end."

Hainey Haynie also revealed that Appcelerator is moving to a services-based business model, rather than relying on support subscriptions as most open source companies have for years.

"We are working on a set of products running in the cloud, monetized through application life cycle products that live in the cloud, all very additive to development.

"We'll offer a set of services you can buy on a premium to premium basis. That's how we're going to monetize it."