@Irakli – sorry I didn’t see your comments sooner. I certainly am familiar with our company tagline, and let there be no confusion – Nuxeo is committed to being open source – it is core to our identity. But we judge our success on the quality and strengths of our ECM offering. We’d rather be known as challenger to traditional ECM vendors than just an open source option. ECM is what we do. Open source is how.

I didn’t mean to indicate that one should ‘prefer’ to modify the source of a CMS. Each decent CMS worth its salt, whether commercial or OSS, is able to provide customization APIs and interfaces (through the browser or otherwise) that enable a site admin to build custom page layouts, custom/structured content types, and custom workflows – very basic ingredients for something claiming to be a CMS.

What I was referring to in terms of the greater extensibility of open source CMS systems were things that are either core to the CMS (such as the administrator/editor interface/functionality) or its ability to integrate with other systems and services on the web that allow the solution to be greater than the sum of all its parts (e.g. integration between Plone and Salesforce or SugarCRM is superior to what I’ve seen available with commercial CMS tools, but even these connectors themselves are open and extensible.)

So, it’s not that one necessarily WANTS to have to dig into the code to modify the date entry widget from his/her CMS, but isn’t having the option of modifying it and improving it, so that it doesn’t limit a content editor from selecting dates prior to 1901, for example, rather than hoping and waiting for a ‘patch’ from the commercial vendor a much better place to be?

And, as others on this thread have alluded, and plenty of Gartner experts, no doubt have indicated, software is trending toward more of a service model and the use of virtualization and/or cloud-based hosting is certainly growing.

So, if the commercial vendors are slow to adjust pricing models and continue to have pricing based upon a per-CPU or per-CPU basis, does this not impede the business from being able to scale its web application managed by its Web CMS? I prefer being able to start up another license-free instance of Zope/Plone and add it to the cluster, perhaps on a new (virtual) server instance in my cloud, without having to get budget approvals for additional license fees.

It’s obvious that businesses need to be more agile than ever and it’s been my experience (we work with commercial and open source solutions and integrate the two, in many cases) that open source wins in this regard.

It isn’t just about the ability to dig into the code. It’s about being able to turn on an dime.

Cheers!

Having said that I think that it is perfectly valid to present anecdotal evidence in the context of \trending.\ I’m putting that out there fully appreciating that I will get people’s comments either agreeing with or disputing my observations. But what I can assure you is that I am not flippant with my blog posts. While I may be commenting from \the gut\ those comments are borne from many conversations with clients and providers and blended with my own views and beliefs which have formed over 23 years working in this industry. It is my hope that observations will provide some degree of insight to readers.

There is a place for both types of observations.

as much as I appreciate your opinion and respect it, my problem is that I did not get a feel that it was factual. Sorry, but your main quote is from a person who contradicts with the tagline of her company. I did not see any data. You say “is trending”. When I hear trending – I think “data”. The only data I see in the blog post is anecdotal.

It feels like the post is written from a “gut feel” rather than factual data.

Thank you for raising important questions, however.

But that’s a separate topic…

30 years of selling and supporting software have taught me that innovation remains a key factor in decisions by enterprises of all sizes to use a particular solution. SAP built their company one module customer at a time, promising to build new capability and then delivering on it. Oracle, Microsoft and others all are companies that rose to the top of their market segments through great marketing and sales, and yes, innovation.

It’s not enough to have the features today, nor simply provide maintenance for those features, organizations want to know that the features they will want tomorrow will also be there. With cars, that means you buy and sell, then buy again. With software of course, the model is dramatically different. Your comparison with JIT is therefore surprising to me.

I’ve stated it another way here:

http://acquia.com/blog/open-source-automotive-manufacturing-obscurity

Tom Erickson
CEO Acquia

You said: \Nuxeo endeavours to frame themselves as a viable Enterprise Content Management provider that happens to utilize open source software – not the provider of an open source Enterprise Content Management solution\

And right across from the logo on http://www.nuxeo.com/ it says: \Open Source Enterprise Content Management\. Kindof contradicts what you are saying and what the CMO allegedly said. I would expect the CMO to actually know what her company’s website chooses as a tagline, but, hey – the naive me, what do I know?

“The client (with help of an integrator or their own technical staff) can customize and extend the product to twist and bend to the client’s needs and integration requirements better than can be done with a commercial tool whose source can’t be modified.”

So, what about commercial product that can be modified? Many modern applications have very nice architectures that allow flexible design through customization and configuration capabilities. Those are generally a lot easier and less expensive than modifying source code.

“Meanwhile many organisations are starting to realise they can use F/OSS without support contracts in place and the sky does not come down” – very true, but that depends on the project. Maybe that’s the case with something like Ruby but I don’t think your average IT organization is prepared to go without support on Linux.

“And what about home grown F/OSS? Many enterprises are open sourcing code of their own creation and fostering collaboration that crosses the company firewall” – again, a good point. But that’s exactly my point. In this case open source is important at the point of production, not consumption.