With all the bad press around MS Windows Vista and the frustrations of many users with the user interface of MS Office 2007 OpenOffice.org 3.0 looks to many like the white knight in the office productivity battle. OpenOffice 3.0 (currently in Beta) comes with a number of new features that make it an even better competitor to MS Office than the versions before. It opens MS Offic 2007 files (e.g. ldocx, .pptx) and it offers enhanced compatibility between the different operation system platforms (e.g. Mac OS, Windows, Linux). So the key goal is to allow more people to collaborate, regardless of their platform and their office suite they are using. Interesting for many could also be the new collaboration features when working on the same spreadsheet files with other people or the Solver functionality that MS Office users may know and Microsoft apparently doesn’t offer for MS Office 2008 for Mac OS any more. Many other changes have been incorporated into OO 3.0, from better PDF support to enhanced charting and better compatibility with MS Office. So it could well be that with these recent changes OO 3.0 will receive an even higher rating on EOS Directory than before. And it’s clearly time for enterprises looking for alternatives to investigate again.

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Content Management is a very popular category in the open source ecosystem. There are more than 2’000 open source technologies out there to handle, manage and distribute content. So why would we need any of the 200 new ones published over the last six months?

Some of the existing 2′000+ solutions are very well known. The most popular and most widely used technologies include: Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal, eZ publish, MediaWiki, openCMS, Plone, Typo3, WordPress and XOOPS. They all have in common that they are being downloaded 1’000 plus times per day, have gathered substantial communities, exist since 5-10 years (exception is “newcomer” Alfresco with only 3 years of existence). You could say there’s no reason to look further. These offerings cover all what an enterprise might need in terms of content management, if one can’t do the job the other will.

So what’s the use for the other 1’990+ solutions and frameworks? And why have open source communities and contributors added more than 200 additional open source content management technologies during the last 6 months? It will certainly not be easy for them to be successful in the already crowded market. They don’t differentiate very much on technology (more than 70% are based on PHP) and they follow common standards for licensing (more than 80% are GPL). They have been created by small and very small communities (more than 80% of the new open source cms have less than three contributors) and their biggest differentiator may be their creative names such as Moon Dragon CMS, Yanel, Luftguitar CMS, Adapt CMS Lite, Yanel or Utopia CMS. Creativity allone will though not make them a winner.

What would we expect from new content management system? We want omponentized platforms, modularized functionalities, aherence to open standard, sophisticated and easy-to-use inline editing, support for state of the art web technologies (such as Ajax, Flash, multi-media), syndication and widgets and a service oriented access. And solutions should be configurable but still easy to handle and manage. That’s probably more than what small 1-2 person team can build in a few weeks. So let’s stick with the top players again who aren’t fully able to cover these things neither? Maybe not, or at least not always.

What is nice in open source is that users can evaluate technologies and pick the one that supports their specific needs the best. In many cases this can be a fairly specialized application and often only a limited scope of functionalities is needed. New entrants have the opportunity to come with advanced architecture concepts, lightweight implementation approaches and state of the art integration of the latest standards. So why not look again at some of the newer technologies? And who knows maybe in a couple of years Luftguitar CMS, Yanel or any other of the new kids on the block from now will be found in enterprise application stacks as often as Alfresco or Drupal today.

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At the recent DrupalCon 2008 in Boston, Dries gave usual “State of Drupal” keynote:

After a quick mention of the work the community did on Drupal 6, Dries focused mostly on what is coming in Drupal 7 and what he sees as the important work to be done. This included showing video from the recent University of Minnesota Libraries usability testing. It’s great to see the lead on a significant open source project highlighting the importance of usability, especially as the community grows.

Additionally, Dries highlighted test coverage, and made the argument that the “code freeze” portion of the development cycle for Drupal 7 could be much shorter if broader test coverage were provided. Having a good automated test framework contributes greatly to the ease of development and debugging for new module authors, existing module maintainers, and the implementers of sites based on Drupal.

Finally, Dries also described longer term planning about the use of Drupal in places where HTML is not the assumed or even primary output: social networking frameworks and the semantic web. This resonates with much of the discussion in other open source communities (DiSo, for example) and reinforces the critical role open source plays in innovation on the web.

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Was it pressure from the EU, a ploy to encourage ISO adoption of MS-friendly document formats or maybe, just maybe, the “disruption” created by enterprise adoption of open source? Whatever the reasons, Microsoft today announced it is:

“implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.”

The products include:

“Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of all these products.”

As Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie put it in the press release: “By increasing the openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to innovate and deliver value for customers.”

According to Matt Aslett of The 451 Group, what it really means is this:

“It’s an acknowledgment that in today’s world, many more flowers bloom when platform companies make their APIs completely open for developers to write to, a la Google and MSFT’s recent investee, Facebook. This is yet another thing Google has taught the largest software company in the world. It appears on the face of it that Microsoft now intends to live by the merit of its products, rather than rely on lock-in.”

Of course, it could also be just a “Good Steve Day,” according to ZDNet’s Open Source blog:

“Is this an honest change of policy, or is this just a bow to political pressure, pressure which lobbying and campaign contributions might some day remove?”

Speaking for myself, I tend to agree with Jay Lyman at The 451 Group, who calls this “Open source disruption realized“:

“This is just another case of companies coming around to market realities. Look at it like the Internet. Did the Internet suffer when Microsoft finally came around and began supporting and focusing on really working with it? Hardly. The companies that have already focused on the enterprise potential and opportunities for open source software retain their lead. They may have to work harder to maintain it, but that is a good thing, both for users and for open source.”

Is a more open Microsoft a good thing? Is it an open door to better interoperability or an open jaw to swallow open source competitors? Post your comments below?

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Drupal, the popular open source enterprise CMS, released version 6.0 last Wednesday. With a large and active developer and user community, there’s a wealth of information available on new features and other enhancements, including:

• New features in Drupal 6.0 screencast
• Drupal founder Dries Buytaert’s announcement blog post
• The project download page
• Plus a wealth of support resources

Drupal has been put to work on sites ranging from Fast Company and Amnesty International to Popular Science and The Onion. EOS Directory sponsor Optaros has used Drupal in a number of solutions including the Chicago Public Radio site Vocalo. Read the case study here and post your comments about the new version.

Update:

Drupal users and others can check out Drupalcon Boston (US) 2008 Monday, March 3 through Thursday, March 6 at the Boston Convention and Expo Center.

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Here’s a quick roundup of recent posts on the spate of open source projects acquired by commercial software companies.

• Novell acquires SiteScape - what took you so long? (451 CAOS Theory)
• Sun Champions Developers, Disruption Of Big Software Suppliers (InformationWeek)

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Maybe you should pay attention to the man behind that curtain — the curtain with all those “Gs” and “Os” on it.

If you think obscure techie blogs might be the canary in the coal mine for spotting the biggest, neatest and next-est idea to reshape the world, you might want to keep an eye on “Open Source at Google.”

Launched with typical Google low-key non-fanfare a week or so ago, recent posts include:

• Project Hosting Just Keeps on Growing Look out SourceForge. Google reports hosting over 80K open source projects in just 18 months.
• Google Sponsors Freedom Training Task Force This post thanks Google for contributing to the Free Software Foundation in support of their efforts to explain how free software licensing works. Talk about doing no evil!
• Announcing the Grand Prize Winners for the Google Highly Open Participation Contest Learn who won Google’s “experiment” (contest?) to see how many secondary school students would contribute to open source development projects. More than 350 participated on ten different projects. Check out the graphs in the post.

While I don’t expect a Google blogger to inadvertently reveal Google’s secret search sauce, this blog bears watching, if only because they keep trying new things over at the Googleplex. Why? Because they can.

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InformationWeek today reported Sun bought German open source firm Innotek, developers of the VirtualBox desktop virtualization tool used by developers. According to the IW report:

Sun said VirtualBox has been downloaded more than 4 million times since being made available in January 2007, and Sun moved quickly to become the acquirer as it maps out a future suite to virtualize customer environments. It plans to use VirtualBox to extend the Sun xVM virtualization software, its hypervisor based on open source Xen.

The story does not mention the price Sun paid, but it’s a sure bet it’s not close — by several factors of ten — to the $1B US the recent convert to commercializing open source paid for MySQL.

What confounds me is … why? VirtualBox is a nice addition to a developer’s toolkit, and would make sense if Sun were pursuing a more developer-centric path into the market. But while NetBeans is a mature open source IDE for Java, supported by Sun, it does not have the following of the Eclipse-based Java products. So maybe that’s the answer — Sun IS trying to woo developers out of the long shadow IBM casts over Java development with Eclipse. Can someone shed some light on this issue? Post your comments below.

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A couple of headlines to start off the week.

• Facing Free Software, Microsoft Looks to Yahoo (New York Times)

Not about open source, exactly. The issue is ad-supported web productivity applications that will compete with Office, though the story does mention Yahoo’s Zimbra in a comparison to Microsoft Exchange.

• Survey finds Ubuntu is the fastest-growing Linux distribution (Open Road)

The Alfresco “content community” is surveyed, and the results are in. Ubuntu & Red Hat Enterprise Linux are moving up. Tomcat and JBoss hold the lion’s share of the app server market. More details and graphics in the post.

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Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s newly buzz-making CEO thanks to the company’s $1B US acquisition of MySQL last month, gave the keynote at this week’s SugarCRM conference. In his keynote, as reported by InfoWorld, Schwartz identified a key reason why his company scooped up the widely-used open source database firm: distribution.

“What was attractive was how profound their distribution was,” Schwartz said. MySQL offers access to about 11 million deployments around the world, and Sun began to see MySQL delivering real value, innovation, and choice, he said. MySQL sells services and support for its database.

If you’ve been wondering about all those other open source acquisitions, wonder no more. The value is in the distros.

Paying less than $100 US for each deployment — make that ‘prospective paying customer who is already using the product’ — Sun has access to millions of potential customers for Sun services, other software products and hardware. That’s not a bad price for a solid customer lead in a business where the long-term value of any enterprise customer is measured in six or seven figures, and it ignores the very real value of MySQL’s current annual service and support revenue (estimated at $100M US) and harder-to-quantify value of its intellectual property.

So maybe we’ve got an algorithm for an open source project valuation. For example, Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra last September cost big Y $350M US. According to a Wall Street Journal story on Zimbra in November 2006, they had some four million users. Allowing for some shrinkage, that’s quite close to the $100 per deployment for MySQL.

But for all you FOSS project leaders out there who are running to check your download and registration numbers, keep in mind MySQL and Zimbra had “commercial” versions and paying customers prior to the big buyout. So don’t count on pocketing a Franklin for every download just yet. Still, a community can dream, can’t it?

Got some other ideas for valuing an open source project? Post your ideas and comments below.

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