open source

During the  MTC 3 event, I met nice people like Bertrand Delacrétaz (one of the ASF Board members) who made an excellent presentation on the Apache Foundation. During his presentation, he explained how this nice foundation is organized and why the ASF projects are solid as the rock. He also introduced Sling which is a new content/web framework based on Jackrabbit , REST and OSGI.  

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Here is my introduction on ECM

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You are welcome to join us to the upcoming open source event in Luxembourg 'Meet the communities' (June 12th). This year, three prestigious ECM communities will present their solution and how they are providing high quality software. This will be a great opportunity to meet peoples from Alfresco , Day and Nuxeo .

You can find more information on the MTC Site.

There are many content management products on the market that could be used in our projects. Those products propose generic solutions for content life cycle management, versioning, workflow and publication but unfortunately they have 3 important disadvantages.

Sun Open Portal will soon have a Content Management System (CMS) infrastructure and an open cms out of the box . This CMS, currently implemented as Document Management System, is JSR170 (jcr standards) compliant and uses Apache's Jackrabbit and its Object Content Mapping (OCM) . The interesting part is that Document Management functionality is exposed via tag libraries where the tags can be dragged and dropped in portlet page and developer can have his own CMS presentation . For this we have netbeans plugin . Check this out at CMSDemo . This CMS solution is in progress and we plan to enhance it further for Article Management , Jobs Management and Ad Management.

I'm glad to know the second "official" OCM reference. this is still in progress and I hope to see the Sun portal team more imply in our OCM framework.

A special thanks to Ruchi .

The European Commission has published its final report on the Economic Impact of FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) on innovation and competitiveness of the EU ICT sector.

This is a heavy report that will take some time to read. I just made a fast reading of this document and find some interesting figures:

• Firms have invested an estimated Euro 1.2 billion in developing FLOSS software that is made freely available. Such firms represent in total at least 565 000 jobs and Euro 263 billion in annual revenue.
• At the end of 2005, 61.2% of code had been developed by individuals, according to copyright and credit claims, while 19.2% was claimed my companies, 5.6% universities, and 7.9% foundations.
• More than 70% of the web servers are running with Apache and +/-20% with Microsoft tools.
• 3/5 of the worldwide Floss developers are living in Europe, 1/5 in the North America and another 1/5 live in other countries.
• 85% of the employers who use some FLOSS and thus (more) likely to be aware of how its developer community works think that FLOSS experience adds value to formal computer science experience. Than, they think that proven participation in the FLOSS world can compensate for the lack of formal degree.
• 32% of the Jobs postings are "FLOSS".

There are other interesting figures in this report. Unfortunately, this document will take time to digest. Anyway, I advise you to read some chapters for a better understanding of the FLOSS influence on European industry.

There is an "interesting" article in the latest AIIM E-DOC Magazine about ECM trends for 2007.

Following this article, the ECM market in 2007 will be like this:

• Microsoft will be there with its Office Share- Point Server (MOSS) and enterprise-class vendors like IBM, EMC will match up with their own offering.
• A real growth opportunity will be in the SMB market, mainly because local resellers will leverage Microsoft and bring ECM to a market that has been underserved by a fragmented industry.
• Vendor consolidation will continue. It is a good news :-)
• Now, we have to manage and store new kind of content like Wikis, blogs, VOIP data streams, and mobile phone SMS messages, ...
• We will enjoy a better understanding of best practices. It is also a good news :-)
• The future is not clear and the ECM open source market is not yet well defined.

The more I'm using and following the open source products, the more I found complex to choose the right one. Only for one think : the famous license. It is so complex to understand and see the differences between products and I expect that managers have more difficulties to understand. Many companies are saying to support the open source model but what does mean "open source vendor" ? Is it not a paradox ?