Technology of Content

Janus Boye said the other day after the BCS open source seminar in London

@McBoof I left London dazed and confused when it comes to open source. Somebody pls. help me explain what open source really means #idiot

Now I only spoke to him very briefly before he had to rush to the airport, but hopefully the following will be helpful: first an overview of the important things about open source in general, and then how they are and will affect content management in particular.

Open Source

I think it is easiest for software developers to understand open source. It came from that community, and it addresses our needs. For a long time no one outside that community was really concerned with it. I think the first time I noticed someone who was not a developer showing an interest was when I was stopped at a tram stop in Vienna by an American as I was wearing a Redhat T-shirt just after their float and was asked who the next open source IPO was going to be, that was 1999 ten years ago now. I suppose that IPO was a big event in the spreading awareness of open source, although it did not perhaps spread much information about what it was really about.

I think the best place to start with trying to understand open source is with three things. I tend to have a bit of a historical approach to things…

The first is Richard Stallman. I recommend him in person rather than in writing actually. Actually that reminds me the first time I ever saw him I was sitting in the Foundry in Old Street and he walked in and proceeded to autograph a woman’s breasts. Anyone who wants to understand open source should hear him explain the roots of the open source movement. I will not really try to explain all that here, but openness is what created the scientific method, and the idea that software got to the point where it was no longer possible to make it do what you wanted because you did not have access to source code, the point where you could not build on stuff any more or fix it, where control of your tools is taken away is a key part of it. Some people have tried to sanitize Richard out of things (the open source vs free software mess) but that is a mistake.

Second is Eric Raymond’s essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar which wass very influential at the birth of commercial open source. It is strictly about software development methodologies, and much of the discussion about the cathedral methods is applicable to open source software too. It is about the huge changes that the internet brought in open source development, the birth of a development method that no longer copied the methods of closed source development but utilised the openness to create true large scale community development in a way that was not possible before, and which closed source cannot replicate. Linux is of course the classic early example of this.

Which brings us to the third thing, community. Open source is first of all participatory, not just for consumption, perhaps a bit against the grain of late twentieth century culture. Actually I am an optimist, with Clay Shirky and against the sitcom, and think culture is swinging this way but we shall see. So for open source, start by using it, then participate. No you do not have to code, although you can learn, there are other ways, bugs, documentation, all sorts. If you just want too see what the community looks like, I can’t recommend anything better than going to a good conference, like FOSDEM next month in Brussels.

Open source in content management

Open source has not affected content management much yet. Almost all content management by volume takes place on open source products (by volume WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal far outweigh anything else). By value it is less clear, open source always has an issue with by value calculations as the revenue models are different, Linux is not the leading server operating system by value, but is by installed base, but is also probably by the value of the services running on it.

But arguably open source content management software has not affected the industry yet, looking now at the larger installations, and the areas that Janus is interested in, indeed that I am. The industry has grown up in a mess as far as standards, ideas, infrastructure are concerned, but the reality checkpoint has been reached. Two standards have so far started to change the technology landscape of content management, JCR and CMIS, and almost all the implementations of these are open source, and most are cross-vendor projects. This change will grow as more standardization and commoditization sweeps the industry, as the industry adopts a web infrastructure rather than the pre-web legacies inherited from the document management history of the business. Everything that this business deals with will be served through the web; almost all web infrastructure is open source software; content management will be no different.

In this field this is all just beginning. Like open source as I said above, it started with developers, about more efficient ways of building, architecting and delivering software; in terms of influence on the end users it is still small. But things are turning as people become aware of open source in the industry, but they clearly still need some help understanding it. I hope this has helped.

Tagged: open source