Re: Will your chosen CMS vendor go bust?

On 06.10.2005, at 11:17, James Robertson wrote:

> At 05:52 PM 6/10/2005, Boris Kraft wrote:
>
>
>> On 06.10.2005, at 06:29, David Warwick wrote:
>>
>>> Escrow is a bad choice in my opinion.
>>>
>>> ...
>>
>> Well put. Thats all there is to say to the topic. It should go to  
>> some (open source) FAQ
>
> Of course, open source is potentially no better a solution.

I did not mean to imply that, but its a good argument against the  
statement "we use proprietary + escrow instead of OS because it brings  
the same security" -- which it clearly is not. I think its well put and  
should not be "lost" in this mailing list.

> As David said, just having the code is not much use, unless
> an organisation is willing to invest _considerable_ amounts
> of time in learning how the CMS operates.

Thats what I completely agree with, and why my argument is, if you are  
willing to go down the escrow-path, it makes more sense to support an  
open-source project in the first place.

> Even in the open source community there is the danger that
> a solution will lose momentum, with the community moving
> onto other projects. (Sourceforge has long recognised this
> phenomena and has attempted to quantify it on the site.)

The general agreement is that it takes about 80 people to keep a  
community alive - what is less agreed upon is where that number stems  
from and who is being counted ;-)

However I think its pretty easy to take he pulse of an OS project,  
since everything happens in the open - you can check the archives,  
subscribe to a mailing list, see the registered members on SF, get the  
download data, site stats etc.

A recent paper [4] has done exactly that and finds that "only 15% of  
projects are actively developed - the remainder (85%) wither and die on  
the vine or are, at best, "lethargically" developed. Over the six  
months measured, 90% of the projects on FreshMeat did not change."  
(excerpt taken from [6])

So you can check whats happening, and make a sound decision, which is  
hard with a commercial vendor. I have not heard of any communities that  
lost momentum once they were self-sufficient, however there are many  
open-source projects that never reach that state. Remeber: being OS  
does not mean anything in itself about the product, just like being  
proprietary does not mean anything about a product.


> In practice, I've found a very useful concept to be
> "self-sufficiency" in terms of day-to-day administration,
> and separately, customisation and development.

Definitely that is a very important point. I think that many commercial  
vendors are building their business exactly around the opposite concept  
- after all, sending your "experts" to build a web page for 325USD/hr  
is good business [1]

But I am not here to bash proprietary systems, I am fully aware that  
there are excellent systems and honest vendors out there. We too sell  
proprietary products like our document management [2] (to be released  
next week) based on JSR-170 standard [3].

Regards
Boris Kraft
---------------------------
Magnolia Content Management
http://www.magnolia.info/
---------------------------

[1] http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/9/27/95759/4240
[2]  
http://www.magnolia.info/en/magnolia/products/document-management- 
system.html
[3] http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=170
[4] http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/CSMR.2003.1192440
[5]  
http://asay.blogspot.com/2005/09/analyst-nature-and-size-of-open- 
source.html