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Mastering The Complex SaleTechnology news and Jobs 
The Linux distillery The future of open source
The Linux distillery The future of open source | The future of open source |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Thursday, 27 March 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 Jeff Whatcott, VP of Marketing for Acquia referred to his company’s experiences, expressing that “The power of open source is exemplified by self-organizing mass innovation that is connected in real-time to market requirements.” He said, “We’re seeing this first-hand in the vibrant Drupal community,” he said.The key finding was that the web publishing and content management market is expected to be the most vulnerable to disruption by open source software. That’s the very market space Drupal lives in. And Joomla, and WordPress, among other well known packages. In fact, the “well known” is a key phrase here. Is it as possible to list three proprietary, commercial web publishing/CMS systems so readily? These apps have made a terrific job of marketing and promoting themselves, of being simple to install (WordPress in particular being famed for its simple one-click setup post uploading the code and setting some configuration items) and it is easy to see they bring utility and functionality to the masses, whether corporations or individuals. The survey results indicate that these very products – or at least, their ilk – will be the next big thing in open source. It is this family of apps which will be the key killer tools bringing about wide-spread adoption of open source technologies and licensing models in the next short few years. Ironically, one barrier preventing some using these systems has been removed by Microsoft themselves. As stereotypical LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP – systems these products have been a natural fit for Linux-based web hosts. It’s possible to make them work on a Windows IIS environment but primarily Microsoft shops have likely been turned off by the need to install additional software. As of Windows 2008 Microsoft’s IIS now supports PHP natively. Perhaps counter-intuitively Windows Server 2008 in its most locked-down “server core” mode even favours PHP over Microsoft’s own ASP.NET server-side scripting language. The upshot is that one hindrance to Windows-based adoption of tools like WordPress has now been eliminated, and from a possibly unexpected source. So, that’s the big news: according to North Bridge Venture Partner’s survey, the days are limited for proprietary web publishing tools. There were other key findings which are particularly interesting about the future of open source. Please read on. CONTINUED |
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