In the last post I wrote a bit about commercial proprietary CMS. These are “pay to play” CMS which come with licensing fees meant to compensate the company for their intellectual property.
Somewhere between commercial proprietary (100% paid) and true open source (100% free) lives commercial open source. It should be noted there is a fine line between commercial open source and commercially backed open source.
Let me give an example: SugarCRM is a popular CRM which has an open source version that can be installed, maintained and extended by your team and you’ll never pay Sugar a dime. That said, there are features of Sugar which are not available in the open source version and a paid version is pushed hard by the company. In commercially backed open source, by contrast, everything is 100% free, but the project itself has a corporate sponsor who is usually interested in offering professional services or being a certified hosting partner. DjangoCMS is an example of this.
Concrete5 is a popular CMS that offers paid extensions to their system, and I have seen this with other CMS as well. This is a trend I hope continues. As with any software I use for my company, I want SOMEONE to be making money so they stay motivated and can keep the lights on. Concrete5 is an example of a company inventing a new kind of commercial open source, fully featured open source versions with paid extensions, cool.
The advantages to commercial open source CMS are similar to those of true open source, with a few additions. The code can be manipulated and extended by internal resources, and cost avoidance can be achieved by hosting the solution yourself. The supporting community of developers means faster evolution of the product, and people’s monetary incentive keeps them motivated to put out quality product as well as gives them resources for things like outside security audits.
The disadvantages are fairly obvious. Of course, the solution is not entirely free, so costs will still be incurred. Also, you need to be careful to make sure the open source version of the solution actually has the basic features required to be useful. Even though there is no direct cost to installing the software, it will suck to find out after spending hours on the installation that the open source copy doesn’t contain versioning. Lowered morale, and lost confidence does have a cost, especially in IT. Also, the usual open source suspects such as security vulnerabilities rear their head.
Still, I still like this model the best. I want people to be incentivized monetarily to produce a great product, and I will always be more comfortable with organizations that have incoming revenue to offset costs and solve problems. (Note: I don’t think incoming revenue and incoming donations are the same thing.) The open source version gives us a chance to test drive the product and tells me something positive about the developer’s confidence in their product.
Tags: CMS, Content Management System, strategy, Web Development
Thanks for the mention, we got some flak from the “die hard open source means no one makes money” gang when we launched the marketplace, but it has already been a great success. From my experience, its really easy to give something away for free when no one is using it. As soon as you have tens of thousands of people depending on it in some way or another there needs to be some compensation involved or entropy will certainly win. Giving away something that might work and telling people they have to pay for support seems like a slap in the face. A small license fee for some features that not everyone needs seems quite reasonable for both sides of the equation. The challenge is of course finding that balance. You don’t want to give away crippleware that effectively serves no one. You want to have a solution that is powerful, serves 90% of the audiences needs for free, and then different options for that 10% who are financing the development of everything.
any rate, great post. thx!
-frz
ceo, http://concrete5.org