J. Todd Bennett and Will Ezell from Dotmarketing presented this morning a session at HighEdWebDev in Rochester titled “Open-Source: In Search of a New Business Model for College Web Site Development.â€
Karine’s disclaimer: I usually shy away from blogging about vendor presentations. This morning, Dimitri Glazkov, CTO at Estrada, another CMS vendor, offered to cover this session he was planning to attend. In my twisted mind, I thought it could be interesting to have two CMS vendors touting the open source approach…
Dimitri Glazkov described himself as a “Web standards and semantic markup junkie.” He also organizes BarCamps and spontaneous Microformats sessions.
Here’s Dimitri’s take on the Dotmarketing team’s presentation:
Alright, I should go ahead and go full-disclosure on y’alls: if you want to get all technical, I represent a competitor of the presenting parties, Estrada. But I gotta tell you, I love these guys. I love them because they are smart folks and they are doing right things. We could probably spend days and weeks splitting hairs over whose product is better, but in my humble-yet-raucous opinion, it really doesn’t matter.
The presentation started off cheerfully enough with a mini-discussion about advantages and pitfalls of open source. Responses from the audience:
Advantages:
* Free!
* You can ask more than one person for help
Disadvantages:
* People run the other way when they hear “open source”.
* Need human resources to implement and open-source solution
* Scalability can be an issue, some open-source products are not designed for “enterprise”
* Have to be very careful in choosing the product that has a lively community
At this point, the presenters voiced “A-ha!”, and offered a solution: a vendor-backed open source, a model in which a corporate entity is positioned as a lead developer and maintainer of open source project. We’ve seen this before with all kinds of flavors of a certain Penguin-driven operating system, as well as the multitude of projects led by Novell and IBM. The dotMarketing guys suggested that this solution:
* shortens product timelines
* keeps community alive
* improves completness and of the product (deploy on download)
In other words, you’d actually have a guy with the money in the pool, rather than your ordinary open source efforts, where no dollar figures or designated dev time are even mentioned per se. In this model, the community still acts as your typical inspiration, testers, real-world dogfooders, and end users. However, a new responsibility is added to the mix: the karma monitors. By the way, at this point the session progressed to a product demo, which you can review all by your brilliant selves over on their site, so I am basically ad-libing here.
Where was I? Oh, right, karma monitors.
Karma monitoring is a simple task: you participate in a project when you feel like it’s a good thing. And you quit or raise cane as soon as the vendor introduces something that serves vendorly interests and negatively impacts direction of the project. That’s it! See, vendors have karma. Some have little, some have lots. Karma translates into developer and user trust, and ultimately success of the vendor-led project. And, karma is fragile and delicate, and not easy to come by.
Don’t believe me? I have two words for you: Google and China.