CM Bottle: A Message in a Bottle for an Open Digital Future
Not long ago, I came across an article titled Why We Built OpenLinker almost by accident. The name naturally caught my attention. OpenLinker describes itself as an open-source channel manager, so I initially expected a story at least partly related to accommodation businesses. I was wrong — and that is precisely what made the discovery so interesting.
OpenLinker is not a channel manager for hotels, apartments and booking platforms. It is built for e-commerce. It connects online shops, marketplaces, inventory, orders, delivery services and accounting systems. Yet while reading their story, I had a growing feeling that I was reading about the same path I had already been following with CM Free, CM PRO and the broader idea of CM ECO.
Two Different Industries, Almost the Same Problem
OpenLinker grew out of a recurring frustration. Their clients were using expensive closed platforms where costs increased along with the number of orders. At the same time, those systems could not truly be adapted to the clients’ own business rules, while their data and operational knowledge remained trapped inside somebody else’s solution.
Their answer was an open, self-hosted core owned by the user. Individual shops, marketplaces and external services connect to it through clearly defined interfaces and adapters.
That made me stop.
It is remarkably close to the central idea behind CM ECO.
The point is not to force one application to contain every function imaginable. The core should remain stable, the data should remain with the user, and an external partner or developer should not need to understand the entire internal structure of the system. They need to understand the agreed communication language and the rules for connecting to it.
The adapter translates. The core decides. A module can be connected, replaced or removed without tearing down the entire house. In two different industries, independently of one another, we had arrived at a very similar answer.
Not Against Profit, but Against Permanent Rent
There is more behind this architecture than a technical question. It is also a question of who receives the value that has been created.
I have nothing against making money. I also like to earn an honest living. A developer should be paid for their knowledge, a support provider for being available, and the creator of a connector for the work invested in making that connection reliable.
The problem begins when profit is no longer the result of creating value, but the result of controlling the gate. The user is then not paying because somebody has done new work for them. They are paying because, without the platform owner’s permission, they can no longer reach their own data, rules or business connections.
An open core and replaceable adapters offer a different model. The user owns the system and the data. Developers, local providers and specialised companies can earn money through installation, adaptation, support and the development of connections that are genuinely needed. The money does not necessarily flow to one large intermediary. It can be distributed more meaningfully among the people who actually create the value.
Open source alone does not guarantee a fair world, of course. New dominant players and new forms of dependency can arise around open projects as well. But an open communication contract and the ability to replace a provider at least reduce the power of anyone who would try to lock the entire chain behind a gate.
Perhaps CM Community Does Not Need Only Hospitality While thinking about OpenLinker, a new question began to form in my mind. What if CM Community does not necessarily have to be only a community of hospitality channel-manager users?
CM Free, Plus and PRO can and should remain clearly focused on apartments, smaller accommodation providers and their everyday work. That is where they were born, where they solve real problems and where they have a clear purpose.
But the principles behind CM ECO are not necessarily limited to calendars, reservations or guests.
Data ownership, an open core, a source of truth, clearly defined communication interfaces and replaceable adapters also matter in e-commerce, local energy, agriculture, service businesses, associations and countless other small systems.
Every industry can preserve its own core and its own business rules. To cooperate, applications do not all need to belong to the same company or live inside the same platform. What they primarily need is an agreement clear enough for them to understand one another.
Perhaps the future is therefore not one enormous application trying to become everything for everyone. Perhaps it will be made of many independent cores that know how to communicate safely with one another.
In such a world, a hospitality channel manager is not the final boundary. It is the first working implementation — proof that it is possible to start with a small, real problem and develop broader principles from it. A Message Without a Proposal
Once I had put this realisation into words, I sent a message to the people behind OpenLinker. I did not offer them a partnership, an investment opportunity or another grand business strategy. I did not ask them to use my system, and I did not claim that we had already created a universal protocol for connecting the world.
I simply told them that someone in Slovenia, working in a completely different field, had reached very similar conclusions.
I asked whether the community around projects like ours might no longer belong to a single industry at all. Perhaps we are all noticing the same deeper problem: how to connect independent systems without forcing everyone into one closed platform.
I do not expect or demand an answer. The message may disappear without a trace. Someone may only glance at it. Or perhaps someone will pause for a moment and think: “We noticed this too.”
Sometimes that is reason enough to say hello.
CM Bottle
After sending the message, a new name appeared almost as a joke: CM Bottle.
A message in a bottle, released into the digital sea.
Not a mass marketing campaign. Not automated contact harvesting. Not a sales funnel in which every human being becomes another potential conversion.
CM Bottle could mean something much simpler and more human: a thoughtful message sent to a project or person we do not yet know, but whose work reveals a kindred principle.
The message would say:
> We are here. We are building in this direction too. Perhaps one day we will meet on the same shore.
CM Connector links systems.
CM Bottle searches for people.
Perhaps it will remain only the name of this first message. Or perhaps one day it will become part of CM Community — a place where open projects from different industries discover one another, say hello, and show each other that they are not walking this path alone.
A Small Contribution to a Different Kind of World
I do not imagine that one free channel manager or one message can change the global economy. But large changes rarely begin as large systems. They often begin as a small decision to do something differently.
Not to lock data away simply because we can.
Not to make connections deliberately difficult so that we can charge a toll at the crossing.
To let people replace one part without forcing them to discard everything else.
And sometimes to create something useful because it is good that it exists — not only because we can extract the highest possible revenue from it. That is my small contribution to society. CM Free is its first tangible part. CM ECO is the idea of connection. CM Community may, over time, become something broader than a hospitality community.
CM Bottle is, for now, only the first bottle.
Bottle 001 has already been released. It was a directed bottle, sent towards a particular shore where nobody would otherwise have known I existed. Whether it is opened, understood or answered is no longer mine to decide.
Now the sea can carry it wherever it will.
--- Links Povezave