In Praise of Open Source Diversity

One of the great strengths of open source is that it offers users choice. You don't like one solution? Choose another. You don't like any solution, write your own (or pay for someone else to do it). Thus it is that many categories have several alternative offerings, all of them admirable applications, and all of them with passionate supporters.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Shock! Horror! Not!

This looks bad:

Open source software names such as Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and Linux are now alongside large proprietary software firms including IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Cisco, and Oracle in the IBM Internet Security Systems ‘Midyear Trend Statistics’ report.

But wait, there's more:

It is the first time that community-developed open source software such as the Drupal and Joomla! content-management software packages for the web also showed up on the list. Tom Cross, X-Force researcher at IBM ISS, said Drupal and Joomla! are open source packages that "have both been vulnerable to SQL injection attacks".

Er, this would be Microsoft SQL Server injection attacks, running on Windows, yes? And that's an open source vulnerability? I think not....

Park at My LAMP Server

Up to the London OpenCoffee meeting yesterday (well, with a name like that, how could I resist?), where I met Anthony Eskinazi. He's the MD of the self-explanatory ParkAtMyHouse.com:

We are a brand new and innovative service which aims to provide affordable and penalty-free parking around public venues by enabling property-owners to rent out their empty driveways, garages, car parks and other spare pieces of land to drivers needing somewhere to park.

Motorists and cyclists on their way to work, a big sports match or a hospital appointment for example, can arrange to use a property-owner’s space on a one-off or regular, short-term or long-term basis.

What I love about this idea - aside from its blindingly obvious nature, always a good sign - is the way it uses technology to make economic and social activity more granular, and hence more flexible and efficient. It also has a green angle, thanks to this tie-up with Zipcars.

Not surprisingly, one reason why Eskinazi was able to turn this idea into reality with minimal resources is because he's built his site (personally) on a LAMP stack. He also mentioned how much he owes to the content management software Joomla, which he says is both easy to use and yet extremely powerful.

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.

The Once and Future Lock-In

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is not going to win any prizes for excitement, but it's important: it's a matter of how companies keep all their organisational stuff these days. So this piece warning about Microsoft's attempt to lock users into its standards at the content repository level makes a good point.

And as it also points out, there's now plenty of open source ECM software out there: Alfresco, eZ Publish, Joomla, Mambo, Midgard, Plone - so there's really no reason to take the one-way road to Redmond.