CM Pros at Molecular
by dpearson
Posted on

CM Pros Massachusetts Community held its second regular meeting yesterday. The meeting was hosted by Molecular in Watertown.

It was extremely well attended, with David Pearson, Chair, Scott Simmons, Moderator, Anthony Wilson, Meeting Planner (connected by cell phone from the Acela train), Nate Aune, Open Source Roundtable Leader (attending by Skype from Minnesota), and Craig Andrews, Slava Asipienko, Bob Doyle, Seth Gottlieb, Jon Garfunkel, Jarrod Gingras, Mary Lee Kennedy, Mihir Mange, Theresa Regli, Bryant Shea, John Eckman and Craig Sinclair.

Scott introduced David Pearson, who reviewed the charter and showed the Community Minutes blog, where he invited us to post comments. He pointed out that the Massachusetts Community is the largest community and the Fall Summit in Boston is the largest CM Pros event. So we should play a large part in making the Summit a success.

David was very pleased to see people of the caliber of Mary Lee Kennedy and Theresa Regli coming to our meeting. He hoped that the next three meetings before the Summit would allow us to try out some Roundtable formats for use at the Summit. He said he had recently sent out the Call for Papers and had about a dozen responses, but was looking for Molecular to submit some. "The more the merrier," he said to make the best summit possible. And he called for help reviewing the proposals and assembling the Summit program.

Bob said that if Scott Abel, CM Pros Vice-president, were here he would ask everyone planning to attend the Summit to register right away. (Summit registration) Scott has a goal of 30 registrations by the end of August. He needs to market the high attendance numbers to potential sponsors of the Summit. Scott Simmons reminded that attendees get $150 off their Gilbane conference, which is a larger part of the members' early-bird registration fee of $195 (including $100 renewal of member fees.

If everyone from this Massachusetts Community registered this week we could get close to Scott's goal and likely achieve the biggest Summit so far. See the current attendees list and get your name on it soon.

After everyone introduced themselves, Scott reviewed Anthony's agenda (see previous post). The main meeting Roundtable subject was Open Source Software. He called for possible topics for future meetings.

Theresa asked "Why are there so many OS CMS vendors? Why not more failures? Why not more consolidations?"
Seth "There are lots of failures. They just don't go away.

Globalization is the Summit theme. Perhaps one meeting on multilingual websites?

Seth suggested we develop "Levels of Localization" to help measure value. For example, Level A = navigation and a couple of basic pages translated. Level C = CMS tool interface translated.

Scott then called for the OSS Roundtable to start and asked Nate to define OSS.

Nate Aune then gave a brief overview of Open Source and identified some top OS CMS developers - Drupal, Plone, Zoomla, Wyona Lenya.

Seth said look at the OSI definition and licenses. They own the term. There are 10 basic rules, the first two being code distribution and no discrimination against particular users, e.g. someone who paid vs. someone who did not. It must be "made available" to all.

Craig Andrews said GPL was a bit stronger. There was considerable discussion. Dual licensing was possible is you wrote all code yourself.

Theresa asked "Why do clients always think Open Source means "FREE!"

Proprietary software is sometimes available as "Shared Source" for paying clients, said Seth, and Bob mentioned escrowing source code to protect against a company failing.

Seth described the most successful OSS business model being commercial support, customizations, add-ons, etc.

Scott asked for examples of companies that say they are Open Source but aren't Magnolia and Jahia were mentioned as stirring up controversy on the OSCOM mailing list.

Scott then introduced the second ten-minute section of the Rountable - What are the Strengths of OSS?

Theresa said "It's FREE!" Everybody laughed.

Seth said, every CMS is a framework. So you need to spend 2-4 times the cost of commercial licenses to customize them to your needs. So the real cost saving with OSS may only be about 20-25 percent of the TCO. Real benefits are not the money. He mentioned the innovation cycle of OSS is very fast compared to proprietary.

John pointed out that proprietary vendors always want you to buy the latest version. There's less pressure from OSS communities.

Bob talked about two key benefits often touted - the support community and the continuity of the basic software. These have been criticized and you should evaluate the community to see if it answers newbie questions or ignores them. At OSCOM 3 Tony Byrne pointed to the frequent "forking" of communities, in which he said it is often the user who gets forked. And different releases of OSS may be abandoning earlier version users as much as happens in closed source CMS.

Nate seconded the importance of good community support. And said look for communities with not just transparent code but also transparent governance. He said a big benefit is that if you have a bug, if the community won't fix it, you can hire a developer.

Craig said if you contribute code back to that community, you earn karma and they are more likely to help you.

Scott introduced the third ten-minute section of the Rountable - What are the Weaknesses of OSS?

David asked if the realtionship between developers and UI designers had improved. He noted how one group seemed to think it was more important than the other. At OSCOM there were developers who said they did not care about end users.

Seth said he saw a real change in the major communities today, moving from a meritocracy of programmers to more credit for help documentation and good design. (From scratching your own itch to working on customer itches.) Release predictability can be a problem (for example Lenya 1.4 took forever, with little client income).

Nate said documentation is a major weakness in OSS.

Bob said that DITA XML is something every OSS team should look into very soon. It makes good task-based documentation much easier to manage.

Marketing is another weakness. John and Bryant both agreed they need much better marketing to convince clients.

Craig Sinclair said the perceived risk is much higher for OSS. "You never get fired for buying IBM" is a cliche, but still important, Bryant reminded us.

Jon called for open governance that includes an open bug list. John said publishing bugs and even benchmarking tests is explicitly illegal according to the fine print in many closed-source licenses.

Scott then asked did we know any real disasters with OSS? No one came up with anything obvious. Chandler was mentioned.

David mentioned Seth Earley's idea for a "Buzz Word Bingo" session meeting with vendors or developers.

Who uses open source? John said they ask client who say they don't use open source, "Do you have any Apache servers, here?," they then show how much open source is really in use. Craig said even Microsoft may include a lot of open source.

Who are the key players in OS CMS? Theresa tried to recall those in the CMS Report, and thought of Plone, Typo3, Magnolia, and Joomla.

Bob said the Massachusetts Community could help man an OSCOM booth at the Gilbane Conference, but Frank Gilbane says he needs a request from OSCOM, the association. Sandro Groganz, who is currently reorganizing OSCOM since Michael Wechner stepped down, says that any of us who are OSCOM can ask in the association's name. We look to Nate Aune, Renaud Richardet, and others in active OS CMS to make this proposal and staff the booth during the Gilbane Conference.

Seth said you don't need a Gartner Magic Quadrant to decide the right OS CMS for your project.

Scott asked what we could do better in the next roundtable. Theresa said we need more controversial questions! She'll think of some.

Overall, it was agreed this was a terrific meeting and the group gave big thanks to David and to Scott, Anthony, and Molecular for hosting (and feeding) everybody.

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