On 23 Nov 2009, at 08:07, Dylan Jay wrote:
All great points, and agree with you... one point specifically I have
been noticing recently...
8) The party line on Acquia is that what's good for Acquia and
Dries is good for Drupal. I saw not a hint of discomfort with that.
I think this is one of the most important points. Maybe it won't
last, and maybe the community will suffer long term by Acquia making
lots of money? Maybe Drupal will end up being vendor opensource with
all its downsides? Who knows.
In the medium term, as an Plone development company, I think Acquia
gives Drupal an unfair advantage. Just the other day we had a very
large organisation say they went with a proprietary solution because
"we can't sue Plone" and decided this before we could even present
to them or explain that opensource means you can purchase a plone
solution from an integrator and then sue them if it goes wrong. We
have liability insurance :)
Acquia gives Drupal the perception of size and credibility to those
who don't know any better. We can dismiss these risk adverse
decision makers of big organisations but I think those people
matter. I agree with Dries when he says "We should all agree that at
the end of the day, success should be measured by the number of
people working with Drupal, not by the number of people working on
Drupal". Plone kicks Drupal and a lot of proprietary CMS butt,
feature for feature but Acquia makes Drupal easier to sell by giving
the perception of security. Anything we can do to help sell plone is
good for plone otherwise we risk being "irrelevant".
... Acquia have shown up on a few 'Magic Quadrant' type lists from
Analysts. Not Drupal, but Acquia. Now Plone is not listed there at all
as it is just an Open Source 'project' and not a 'vendor' in the
traditional analyst sense. That said I think that is an advantage ;)
but I'm sure potential buyeers might not.
Someone recently pointed out that the role of most Gartner-type
analysts is not to comment on the suitablity of the CMS to your
particular organisation, but to just comment on whether the vendor is
going to be around next year or not. Hence why 'Plone' is not on those
lists as it is not a 'vendor', but it does make me think we do lose
out a bit on mindshare as a result.
Its a tough one as I agree what you say about Acquia making Drupal
easier to sell.... but on the other hand I don't want to ever end up
with a 'Plone Acquia'.
-Matt
--
Matt Hamilton [email protected]
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk +44 (0)117 9090901
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
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