A key building block for our development team was the use of open-source technologies. Both our business and IT teams agreed that this was almost a necessity for us at the early stages of development when operational costs, scalability and application evolution are important issues.

Open-source has enabled us to remain over 85% internally funded. This keeps the decisions in-house and focused.

PrivaSign was designed, tested and built on Debian, primarily based Debian’s community support, stability and security. PrivaSign began development of its first system almost 5 years ago selecting mod_perl and Postgres for their maturity and established production level stability.

This combination of stability and flexibility created by organic multi source development has served well even through product evolution.

A continuation of our development on open-source platforms, we saw flexibility as a key feature for the electronic signature market. Call it indecisive, but rather than limit ourselves, or our customers, to one browser or file type we fully embraced the simple fact that the service should not dictate the business process.

When you use a fax machine you don’t think about the type of paper it uses or if the recipient’s machine is compatible. You just need it done. Love Microsoft? Great, use MS Office and then send a file. Prefer OpenOffice or have a client on Macintosh with a Safari browser? No problem. The fact remains, PrivaSign gets your file signed. Anywhere in the world, if you have internet access you can sign a file instantly.

The new service goes into public beta April 24th, 2006, so I worked out a special signup bonus for the open-source community. When you create your free account here just enter the following (open) into the coupon field and receive $10 of PrivaSign credit.

I hope you enjoy and let me know what you think!