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Where content meets technology

Sep 19, 2008

Bluenog subtly forks Hippo

I was catching up on my blog reading and noticed a few announcements about Bluenog's new integrated suite offering ICE. I knew that Bluenog was a preferred US Hippo CMS integrator (before Hippo opened a U.S. office) and it made me wonder if their platform was based on Hippo (despite the fact of not mentioning it). Sure enough, Bluenog CMS is a direct fork of Hippo. Hippo's permissive Apache 2.0 open source license allows this but I think that it is considered standard practice to at least mention where the code came from. While the UI is most clearly Hippo with a simple logo swap, Hippo is mentioned nowhere in the literature. It took some digging to find the list of open software included in the full Bluenog ICE suite. The Bluenog product itself is not open source (license). The only downloads available are the compiled JARs and to get that, I needed to fill out a registration form.

Meanwhile Hippo B.V., makers of Hippo CMS, continues their work on their re-write of Hippo. While the wiki has not seen much change, there seems to be a steady flow of source code commits.