The Great Web CMS Debate: Open Source or Proprietary Software? You Decide...

Our ‘Future of Web Content Management’ debate with Gartner, Econsultancy and the World Health Organisation is only a week away.  As mentioned here before, it’s all happening in London at the Australian Embassy on July 2nd (that’s next Thursday). 

Whether you’re able to make it or not, we’d love to hear your views on the future of Web Content Management and the role of Open Source and proprietary software... Because we’re going to structure the session in a new and rather radical way.  Kind of like a ‘delegate takeover,’ we’re going to run the afternoon debate slot as a ‘talk show’ format, whereby you, the audience, dictate the terms of engagement...

All you need to do is give us your input before next Thursday and we’ll make sure that the best of it gets put to our panel.

There are two ways to do this:

Drop us a question/thought/challenge on the subject of Open Source and proprietary software and their place in the future of web content management in reply to this post (below)

…or, Tweet us your input using the hashtag ‘#CMSdebate’.  You can also Tweet us directly at @squizuk.

This is your chance to put your views to our star-studded panel: you can bowl a grubber to Gartner, throw a spanner into Econsultancy’s latest ‘CMS Survey Report’, and give the World Health Organisation a health check.

To get things rolling, here’s just some of the Open Source vs proprietary software issues we’ve picked up on during the past week.  We’d love to tackle them all, but tell us what you think.

Jonathan Schwartz , CEO of Sun Microsystems, has been very vocal lately on the success of Sun’s open source product suite. 

He claims that adoption of Open Office has doubled year on year, with a whopping 100,000 downloads a day… and that uptake of MySQL has increased 30 per cent. 

He reckons this is down to ‘IT budget cuts, which push you to look for the best free software available to run your business systems.’ 

But what do you think?  Is this marketing guff?  Is it a sign of green shoots of growth in the software business?  Or, is Open Source the real deal, the future of everything?

Elsewhere, the UK government has announced a radical policy to adopt Open Source Software solutions unless a solid business case can be made for using proprietary systems instead.



What’s your view?  Was this a stealth tactic to bolster Gordon’s coffers in advance of the expenses scandal? Will Open Source prove to be the pill that keeps the UK’s ever-ambitious NHS tech strategy on track? 


And here’s some other things that we’d love to hear your views on…. the pros and cons of Open Source vs proprietary software.  We’re welcoming all of these perspectives into the debate:


• What about functionality? Is Proprietary software more progressive than Open Source?  Or, does the breadth and scale of the Open Source development effort lead to more rapid innovation?
  
  
• What about the 'free'? Is the ‘freeness’ of Open Source its Achilles heel?  How can the movement be make money?  Or, will the new wave of Open Source business models help to drag the software business through this recession?
  
  
• What about the money? Is Open Source just a series of budgetary smoke and mirrors?  Does Open Source cost more to implement?  Or, does the relative ‘freeness’ of Open Source enable us to do more interesting, valuable things with our money?
  
  
• What about license fees? Are they an unfair way to charge for an exchange of goods?  Have proprietary vendors been propping themselves up on bloated licenses and SLAs for too long?  Is an Open Source license a can of copyright and intellectual property worms just waiting to be discovered?
  
  
• What about the development community? Is Open Source Software a more rewarding environment to work in?  Are the skills more portable? Are they easier to acquire?  Or, is it a safer, more valuable bet to train and enable your people on tried and tested proprietary platforms with standard certification processes?
  
  
• What about quality? Does a proprietary license bring with it a rubber stamp of approval?  Or is this just a red herring?  Isn’t a Microsoft product just a permanently paid-for beta version?  Is Open Source’s claim to more rigorous development standards just a ruse perpetuated by self-interested men in sandals?
  
  
• What about support?  Does Open Source mean you have to go it alone?  What does this mean for enterprise adoption?  Nobody gets fired for buying IBM: is an Open Source strategy a risk too far for a corporate IT Director? Or, are new support services from ‘Supported Open Source’ firms the perfect antidote to the bloated insurance policies offered by proprietary vendors?
  

We’re sure you’ve got more burning issues to add to the mix... So please do drop us a line and put Gartner, Econsultancy, the World Health Organisation and Squiz to the test...

The Future of Web Content Management is up for debate.  You decide the terms. You set the direction.  Drop us a line here. Tweet using #CMSdebate or get in touch directly via @squizuk....

Author: Ben Wales
Published: 24 Jun 2009 8:30pm