Feb 02, 2007
This AP Story talks about an initiative to expand the 911 emergency program to accept videos and images. It sounds like a great idea to put the ubiquity of cell phone cameras and mini video cameras to use. Not only would the thousands of words expressed by a picture be effective in explaining the facts to the 911 operator, these images could be valuable evidence in legal trials that might arise from the emergency. However, there is concern about the ability of the already extended 911 system to handle all the images and videos that might be reported. In addition to uncertainty about adequate network bandwidth, 911 operators need the tools and processes to evaluate and catalog all the visual content that they receive - a perfect application for a Digital Asset Management solution.
The article does not name vendors that they are talking to but this would be a very cool case study. The solution would have to be optimized for rapid-response usability and also records retention. This kind of Digital Asset Management implementation might also push the state of the art in automated image interpretation (is this a fire or a hit and run? is the person in the picture a convicted felon?).
Jan 28, 2007
There are a number of companies making money "selling" open source software. These products can be very attractive to buyers who are considering using open source but do not want to give up commercial software accountability. When evaluating commercial open source options, in addition to understanding how these applications may satisfy your requirements, you should ask two additional questions:
- How does this company make money?
- Will you be charged fairly for your intended use of the software?
The first question, is very important. You don't want to partner with a company that does not have a sound business model. Distributing software under an open source license is a practical and powerful business strategy that dramatically reduces the cost of sales and marketing. However, even with low expenses, a healthy bottom line depends on a reliable revenue stream. If the vendor goes out of business, you will lose all the benefits of going with commercial open source. You _want_to contribute to the health of the vendor, but you don't want to pay beyond the value you enjoy. You also want flexibility if you do not experience the value that you have been promised.
To help answer these questions, I thought it would be useful to explain the different business models that commercial open source vendors practice. To do this, I will break them down to groups with examples. These categories are not exclusive. You will see that some companies practice hybrids.
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Tiered Versions. Many commercial open source vendors distribute a trimmed down "Community Version" of their software under a restrictive open source license such as the GPL, and then sell a more full featured "Enterprise Version." Usually the features that are considered necessary for enterprise deployments (such as LDAP integration, clustering, etc.) are withheld from the community version. The enterprise version may be presented as a bundle of commercially licensed "plugins" that work on top of the community foundation or it might be a totally different code base. The enterprise version will usually be sold with a maintenance package which provides commercial style support for an annual subscription fee. The community edition may or not be supportable. SugarCRM, Jahia, Magnolia, and Zimbra fall into this category. Jahia is interesting because a customer can earn credit toward licensing fees of the enterprise version by underwriting the development of a feature that is on the product roadmap.
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Badgeware. A corollary to the "Tiered Version" model is to distribute a single, open source licensed code base but require non-paying users to display a "powered by" logo on the application. For WCM software, this includes all the externally facing pages of your website. There is a debate whether software distributed under these restrictions qualifies as open source. The badge requirement may be tolerable for some informal uses such as intranets or a non-profit that looks at their software vendor as a contributing sponsor. Alfresco and Jahia have these restrictions on the free versions of their software.
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Dual License. While often confused with the "Tiered Version" model, a Dual License is where the exact same software is distributed under a commercial_ and_ open source license. Which license you need depends on how you intend to use the software. The open source version of the license is usually the GPL or a similar license that would prevent the user from selling a derived work or bundling it with a commercial application. If you are just using the software to run your business, you can usually go with the open source version. If you are using it in the creation of a proprietary [updated based on Sandro's comment] product, you need the commercially licensed version. This is how eZ publish is distributed.
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Support. Probably all commercial open source companies rely on support and/or maintenance revenues. However, some companies make it difficult not to purchase support. One model is to distribute a "Community Version" that, while functionally equal to the "Enterprise Version," is "unsupported." This may mean that it has not been as fully tested as the packaged versions that are distributed to paying customers. It may also mean that if you ask for help, you need to migrate to the enterprise bundle before someone will even respond. Companies that have these kind of policies require their customers to decide whether they ever will need support before downloading the software. They generally have the attitude that if you use the software for production purposes, you should be paying. Alfresco operates in this way. Other companies are more liberal and allow you buy your support package the first time you need it. This is how eZ publish works. There are also companies that run community based projects and sell support packages. Examples include Alkacon software (the company behind OpenCMS), Outerthought (the company behind Daisy). In general, if the software is very widely used, a vendor can afford to be more flexible about support. If there are millions of downloads, they only need a small percentage of users to actually buy a support package. That is why MySQL is so successful. I don't know if a CMS application could achieve the user base to make those multiples work but there are a number of companies that are trying to find out.
All of these business models try to do one thing: create value for customers and make them pay proportionately. This is not a bad thing. It is what businesses do. Some companies consider the value as the software itself and the users are obligated to pay to use it. Other vendors feel like the value is in the service (support and maintenance). Like all partnerships, your relationship with your software vendor will be better if you understand each others' needs and perspectives and work together under terms that are mutually beneficial. The relationship will likely fail if either side tries to take advantage of the other by trying to get services for free or locking the customer into unreasonable terms. This does not mean that using commercial open source software for free is immoral. The software vendor also needs to think of getting value from its non-paying user base. But that was a topic for another post.
Jan 27, 2007
I just posted the latest episode of The Malcontents podcast. Our guests were Rahel Bailie from Intentional Design and Scott, The Content Wrangler, Abel. We had a great discussion about the needs of content producers and how to maximize efficiency and quality through better content management practices.
Jan 18, 2007
Bricolage and Drupal are two CMS that I follow very closely. I like them both for very different reasons. Bricolage is a back-end only CMS designed to automate a publishing process and then write a static website (or populate the repository of a dynamic website). Bricolage does not run on the servers that your visitors hit. This is great for when you already have your presentation tier or you have some very specific requirements that compel you build, share, or buy special content delivery capabilities.
Drupal, conversely, is all front end and the content production capabilities are, by design, quite lean. Drupal is designed to blur the line between content consumer and contributor. Adding, editing, and responding to content functionality is built into a single user interface. Drupal also has nice content aggregation capabilities to bring in content that has been produced on other sites and make it available for a more interactive dialog among visitors. Lots of traditional media companies are using Drupal to enable community generated content.
So what would happen if you put these two systems together? The Tyee did just that. The Tyee has been using Bricolage to produce a digital daily newspaper (great content by the way. definitely worth reading) for some time now. More recently, they enhanced their comment system by adding Drupal to their architecture. But commenting is just a start. In the future, they will be adding more community-interactive functionality based on Drupal.
This is a great example of a media company building an audience through traditional publishing processes and then layering in collaborative features to actively engage their readers.
Jan 16, 2007
Brendan Quinn just sent The BBC's Fifteen Web Principles to the CM Pros mailing list. If you want to think about how to leverage your content in a Web 2.0 world, this is a great place to start. One of the primary themes is simplicity - an idea that I am getting very interested in.
Jan 15, 2007
It has been a long time coming but Drupal 5 is finally here. Jeff Robbins from Lullabot has a great screencast showing the new features. Key enhancements include better administration interfaces, more tunable caching, and integration with the popular Javascript library jQuery.
Jan 14, 2007
I didn't want to do this but a recent explosion of comment spam has forced me to turn on comment moderation. I promise to approve your comment as long as it is not obvious comment spam.
Jan 06, 2007
I have been meaning to blog about Dave Gynn's webinar reviewing events that shaped open source in 2006. Seeing Dave's post on his blog gave me the nudge I needed. There are a couple of content management points that Dave makes in this presentation. Here they are (with my commentary):
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Mergers and acquisition in the commercial CMS software industry may spill into the open source market segment. There are a number of very innovative open source content management software companies whose development trajectory and features may be attractive to commercial software companies which tend to move at a slower pace. This is especially significant in the context of Web 2.0 trends such as a faster development cycle and collaboration. A similar strategy is for commercial software companies to apply open source community practices to their customer bases. Good examples include Microsoft's creation of a developer community around its SharePoint product and Ektron's Developer Community.
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The OpenDocument Format became an ISO standard and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts drove efforts to make migration easier. As Stephen Walli likes to say, there are de facto standards and de jure standards. Microsoft Office is certainly the de facto standard and that might be more important. Still, it is interesting to see what happens with Open Office because Microsoft may not want to help competitors of its content management products create seamless desktop integration. For example, eZ publish allows you to download any structured content type into OO Writer, edit it off line, then upload it back in with the structured preserved.
Dave also makes some good general FOSS observations such as the fact that there was no significant legal activity in 2006. It seems like legal fears are dying down. My clients seldom mention legal liability. Also, Java is now open source. I still don't really know what this will mean for the language. Dave thinks this will spur innovation. I guess that would depend on how well Sun builds and leverages a community. If they don't, open source alternatives to Sun's components may gain an edge. Or developers will continue to increase their interest in Ruby, PHP, and Python.
Dave, it is good to see you back in the blogosphere. I was wondering what you were doing with all your spare time ;).
Jan 05, 2007
CM Professionals will be getting a new Executive Director (press release). Scott Abel is a human dynamo and I am so happy that he will be filling this role. Executive Director is a paid part time position so Scott will have even more time to dedicate to CM Professionals. This also opens up more slot on the Board of Directors: a one year term. The election process is just starting. So if you are interested in helping shape the future of the organization and the Content Management discipline, you should throw your metadata into the ring.
Jan 03, 2007
Update: I posted my slides here.
I did a presentation called Open Source MythBusters at the Fall 2006 Gilbane Conference on Content Technologies in Boston. Gilbane still has not posted my slides but Toby Ward did a nice summary in his blog.