Drupal: Big in Afghanistan?

I love statisitcs about open source - not least because they are still quite thin on the ground. Here's some fascinating stuff from Drupal, the free content management system: statistics on user demographics, including each country's current rank and percentage market share. Here are the main figures:

United States 1 (33.12%)
India 2 (5.68%)
United Kingdom 3 (5.14%)
Afghanistan 4 (4.64%)

Now, India as a growing market I can understand, but Afghanistan about to overtake the UK? Hmm, interesting....

Omeka: Open Source Museums

One of the canards about open source is that it lacks apps, particularly for vertical markets. While that may have been true ten or even five years ago, it certainly isn't today. Take Omeka:

Omeka is a free and open source system built to be simple and flexible system for organizations, cultural institutions, and individuals to manage and publish items, collections, and exhibits on the web. Learn more.

The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) is partnering with the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) to develop Omeka as a next-generation web publishing platform for museums, historical societies, scholars, collectors, and educators.

Open source content management and web publishing software for museums: how much more specialised do you want to get? (Via DigitalKoans.)

Doing the Joomla Mambo

Forks are a particularly intense moment for free software projects, and examining the reasons for and result of a fork throws fascinating light on the dynamics of the open source world.

One of the most famous recent forks is in the world of content management systems, when Joomla split off from Mambo. There's a fascinating - and impressively full - history of how and why that happened. It all seems to have turned out rather well, with both projects flourishing - a textbook case of how to manage a fork.