Niku Corp. has placed the future of its decade-old Workbench project-scheduling software in the hands of the open-source community. The move is expected to cut the resources Niku devotes to developing and maintaining Workbench while providing customers with the ability to make enhancements to the software on an as-needed basis.

Niku's move to create Open Workbench is in response to customers seeking inexpensive or free commodity software. This trend won't hurt software-industry revenue, says Mark Moore, Niku's executive VP for products and services. Instead, he says, reliance on the open-source community to tweak mature products such as Workbench will force software vendors to devote more resources to new products that generate greater revenue.

Niku has released most of the Workbench code at OpenWorkbench.org and plans next month to make the code available through SourceForge.net, an open-source software development site.