Hi, In light of the recent, frequently heated recent discussions I've seen on the list, I wanted to at least present another side of the open source vs. commercial debate. Much of this may not be applicable to your own situations, but it may be of interest nonetheless.
I work for a nonprofit foundation, one that exists to help independent media organizations in countries where a free press is under threat. Sometimes the threats these media (newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, websites)organizations face are financial, and sometimes they are physical. We provide assistance to these organizations on three levels - financial (usually in the form of loans), educational, and technological. Our foray into Open Source software began in 1999, when one of our client organizations requested funding for a database-driven website. And then another, and another. So we ended up building a content management system specifically for news organizations - one that met our specific needs, like support for Unicode, support for right-to-left languages like Arabic, and a high ease of use (after all, journalists in these countries have a lot of bigger problems to worry about). We decided to release our software under the General Public License for two very practical reasons: firstly, with a limited development budget, we decided that we would rely on the good will of the Open Source community to donate their time and effort to the project, and secondly, we realized very quickly that as a foundation with other priorities, we would never be able to have sales structures in place to ensure revenue from a conventional business model. In addition, many of the countries we operate in have a very high rate of software piracy, and we wanted to remove the incentive for piracy from the very beginning. All these things, in addition to being interested in actually making our own contribution to the code base available under the GPL, led to our decision to free our source. Our software, CAMPSITE, has just reached Version 2.1, and includes a lot of features not found even in many commercial CMSes, like a WYSIWYG java editor for writing and editing stories, built-in support for paid subscriptions, and a publication-friendly workflow model. Its templating is easy to use, and the system is extremely stable. We have a small but growing community of developers and users, and more are coming every day. And after a slow start, now we are beginning to see the benefits of an Open Source development model. The growth curve is starting to look like a hockey stick. It was quite in the beginning, but now users are getting involved. One, for example, wants to use CAMPSITE as the basis of a for-profit hosting service for rural newspapers in Colorado - and we support that completely. He's giving back to the community in his own way, namely providing support to other users and taking part in beta testing. Another user, a publisher in Portugal, contributed localization to Portuguese. Yet another is providing a stipend to CAMPSITE developers working on features they require - we try at every turn to make sure our developers get paid. Please note the difference between getting paid and getting rich. We also try to promote the use of developers in countries like Romania, former Yugoslavia, and Malaysia, and when we can, we provide a stipend. In addition to providing good service at a lower rate than in the West, we also are promoting, in our own small way, to the establishment of viable IT companies in these countries. We also have developers in the West, mind you, and welcome any volunteers. I strongly believe that our CAMPSITE CMS is best-of-class when it comes to its small niche in the CMS market: small and medium media sites, and would welcome any of you to give it a try - kick the tires and see if it holds up. We're finding that what we've built for some pretty rough circumstances has relevance in more urbane locales - kind of like a Range Rover. Do I believe that all CMS projects should go Open Source? No. I believe that it's fine when a system - and more importantly, its integrators - create value for a customer and a customer is willing to pay for it. (Even we have a mechanism on our site for donations.) But I also do not believe that all CMS projects should be commercial. The variety of choices available to customers should be rich and varied. Best regards, douglas Douglas Arellanes Head of Research and Development Media Development Loan Fund, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.campware.org +420 2 3333 5356 -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
