Re: [OSCOM] oscom past, present and future

Martin Bähr wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 03:21:53PM -0400, Gregor J. Rothfuss wrote:
>> http://www.advogato.org/article/544.html
>> http://www.advogato.org/article/657.html
> 
> oh, wow, these are very interesting, thank you.
> 
> now it would be really interesting if you could write an update to those
> articles from the present day perspective, and then i am curious to see
> what we can learn from this for the future of oscom.

that's easy. i consider these goals to have failed. it is still a pain 
to migrate content from one OSS CMS to another, a community for CSS 
skins that work across CMS has not emerged [1], the CMSML effort to 
bring more transparency into CMS selection has stalled [2], to name a few.

what has changed is that there are now a small handful of OSS CMS that 
dominate the market. interop by market dominance, as it were. for an 
outside view of this space, see john newton on ECM commodization [3] 
(hat tip to seth). and that is a good thing: no one cares about or needs 
hundreds of broken CMS.

what also changed, albeit to a sadly small extent, is uptake of things 
like microformats, that offer immediate benefits to a CMS community, and 
help interop in their own ways. [4] offers a good example.

henri has always been a model citizen for OSCOM: he took the best ideas 
from OSCOM and implemented them in a pragmatic way into midgard. as a 
result, midgard today is a far friendlier and more powerful product than 
it was in 2002. it would be good to have his perspective on this point.

maybe OSCOM could become an effort by second tier CMS to stay relevant, 
i don't know. the first tier ones clearly have little incentive to 
participate here at this point, sadly.

it seems to me that OSCOM was unable, over the years, to offer enough 
incentives for the problems in those two articles to be overcome, or was 
unable to formulate them to resonate with people.

i have been involved in many of these failed efforts, and clearly was 
not able to make them a success. i cannot offer fundamentally new ideas 
, so it truly is time for new hands to do better.

-gregor

[1] http://wiki.oscom.org/tiki-index.php?page=CSS+Naming+Conventions
[2] http://oscom.org/pipermail/general/2006-September/001131.html
[3] http://newton.typepad.com/content/2006/09/commoditization.html
[4] 
http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/firefox-extension-for-microformat-utilization.html

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