First, let me paint you a quick picture: I grew up professionally in the Dot.Com universe. I started as tech support in an ISP and then moved into application development with the Internet as the delivery mechanism of choice. I lived on Unix, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for years. Sun’s Solaris, IBM’s AIX, Linux of many flavors and even the beautiful BeOS. (I really liked the BeOS by the way, it was flashy, stable and powerful when the rest were just stable and powerful.) That tidbit of background was important to say that after the last 6 years in the corporate mainstream, read Microsoft development world, and I am very happy to see open source making a real push to become stable enough so that even the most die-hard corporate IT managers will accept open source in the enterprise.
One of the fronts where open source really shines is content management systems, or CMS. Web-based CMS grew out of the development environment of the mid 1990s where a group of developers put together a huge string of scripts designed to make their days easier. Imagine this scenario:
HR guy wants to update the static HTML page with new hires and so he talks to Developer guy. Developer guy sees a chance to make another cool tool that would allow HR guy to edit his own pages without calling Developer guy. Do this enough times and soon Developer guy has a pretty good system in place, but it only really works for this one company. Take this up a few levels and we had the first CMS systems out there that developers could download off the Internet, edit and make them run on their own infrastructures.
Today someone building even large dynamic sites might not know a thing about writing code thanks to modern CMS packages. Systems like Joomla, Drupal, ExponentCMS, Mod-X and WordPress, the tool used to run TechnologyStory.com, are widely used by professional and amateur bloggers alike. They all offer a fairly user friendly back-end to manage the site’s content as well as a large variety of plugins, both free and professionally built. All of the systems are built to allow the producer of the site a position whereby the daily needs of a developer are met by the application itself. Developers are still needed of course, but only when you need to do development above and beyond what the CMS suite offers you.
Granted, using open source software has some scary issues for more corporate IT groups to get past. The source is open, and that alone scares off some companies. Development is usually based upon open programming languages such as PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails or C++. And lastly, classically these tools or applications are built to run upon Unix or Linux first, so that is another hurdle.
All of these are manageable and the result in a foray into the open source world can be bountiful. There are not a lot of classic IT operations running Unix or Linux, as a large majority are Windows shops, so this in and of itself can slow the adoption of open source. With most of those shops being Windows based, the majority of development has been in the Microsoft world as VisualBasic or now the dot.Net system. There are a couple of open source applications out there, such as the DotNetNuke application. I will reserve my review of the DNN suite for another day.
I have only briefly mentioned a small slice of the open source movement here in this posting, to investigate more please visit the Open Source Initiative.
Interesting Site of the Day: Netcraft.com. Netcraft is a tool that many techies have used for years. You can quickly see what a web site is running their system on, how long they have been up and even where they host. For instance, we are running our site on Apache utilizing WordPress.