Open Source

A few days ago, I mentioned that "Drupal 6 feels ready to me" for public release. Evidently, that was more than feeling as Drupal 6 was released early Wednesday morning.

Alfresco Software released a press release on the results of a survey by them intended to help determine "how companies evaluate and deploy open source and proprietary software stacks in the enterprise". There is some very interesting numbers summarized in the press release that should be of interest to not only using those Alfresco products, but to almost anyone using enterprise software. Some of the more interesting numbers and statistics pulled from the study:

• Operating system: “Users evaluate on a Windows laptop and deploy on Linux” – 41% of evaluations were on Windows, dropping to 26% for deployments, whereas 51% of deployments were on Linux.

• Linux: “Ubuntu and Red Hat pull away, SUSE remains flat by comparison in the US” – Ubuntu 24%, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 21%.

• Windows: “Users stick with XP and 2003, Vista lags at 2%” – XP 63%, Windows 2003 28%.

• Databases: “Sun still shines on MySQL” – MySQL 60%, Oracle 14%, MS SQL Server 13%.

I especially find it interesting that while open source MySQL is the dominate database used on the enterprise, two propriety database systems (Oracle and MS SQL) follow. I wonder where PostGresSQL falls on the list? But wait, there are two points I want to make about this study.

First, the business world no longer survives solely on propriety software. Secondly, these numbers reflect something I've just concluded recently...those arguing for propriety-only or open source-only systems don't have a clue what is really going on in the world of IT today.

Yesterday evening, I spent about two hours updating my site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 RC 4 for another weekend test at my site. About 30 minutes was spent backing up the site and installing Drupal 6. The rest of my time was spent with tweaking things via Drupal's admin menus as well as looking at the contributed modules and themes available for D6. I'm currently using the Salamander theme and only two contributed modules, Image and CAPTCHA. I also spent some time placing snippets of PHP code in my blocks to replace many of the functions I was doing with Views. The end result is that with only two hours of work, I am just fine running CMSReport.com on Drupal 6

As I said last week, it's amazing how many people overlook the power of Drupal...even without its contributed modules. Yes, I'll be glad when the Views, Panels, and even the TinyMCE contributed modules are ready to use with Drupal 6. But I've always looked at contributed modules as modules of convenience and not necessity. I'm convinced that most people do not have to wait for Views to move onto Drupal 6. Views only automated a number of SQL tasks that can easily be done with PHP. Some Drupal users are going to object when I say it is "easy" because they are not PHP developers, but you know what, I'm not a PHP developer either. In fact, I'm kind of slow, but I seem to manage along just fine with D6.

As usual during this period of the development process, people are wondering if the new version of Drupal is ready to be released or if there will be another release candidate. Whether this is the last release candidate or not for Drupal 6 I'm not sure anyone can really say. All I will say is Drupal 6 feels ready to me.

As most Drupal users already know by now, Drupal 6 is currently at a Release Candidate 3 stage of development. For the Drupal community, this is a time when the developers are wanting people to test, report, and help fix any bugs found in these development version of the Drupal software. At this stage of development, Drupal.org still does not recommend Drupal 6 to be ran on the production server.

As with everything still in development, we do not recommend running release candidates on a live site. Also, always be sure to make a backup of your data before performing any upgrade or starting testing.

Amy Stephen, site leader for Open Source Community, submitted her 5,000th post in the Joomla! Community Forum. The Joomla! community makes a big deal out of these type of achievements and we've covered some of their milestones in the past. You know what? It's hard not to celebrate someone else's contributions to open source communities. Congratulations to Amy!

Amy Stephen's 5,000th post in the Joomla! Community Forum

A new version of Elgg, the open source social networking platform, has been released. New features in Elgg 0.9 include:

• New "content" function for static pages editing
• Improved sidebar customization
• Simplified visual installation
• Security improvements
• Refactoring more functions into /mod
• Improved access permissions for admin to all areas/objects

Elgg 0.9 can be downloaded from SourceForge.

Except for some Python programming, I've done very little software development this decade with most of my efforts in the 80's and 90's (BASIC, Pascal, Perl, Tcl, etc). Those that know me know I've wanted to dig more into PHP and Ruby, but I have been distracted by one sorry excuse after another.

Elgg, an open source social networking platform, opened its development process much wider the past few months. Not every company that goes fully open source benefits from the changes in their license or the changes in how they develop and manage the code. However, open source seems to be treating Elgg very nicely these days.

I have not had time to talk about Google's Highly Open Participation Contest. Luckily, Amy Stephen posted a good article about the contest at Open Source Community which I encourage you to read. In the article, she talks about the positives of this program for both the high school age coders as well as the open source communities involved.

As Amy mentions in her article, Google invited ten Open Source projects, including Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python and SilverStripe to participate. In Google's own words this is what they have to say about their program:

I just completed one of the most exhausting days at work I've had since switching over from operations to IT. Everyone wanted a "minute of my time" which translates in the real world to 20 minutes (if I was lucky). The last thing I really wanted to do after work was touch a computer. Yet, I find myself too excited to not type about some great news.

What is the good news? Dries Buytaert, project leader for Drupal, is starting his first Drupal startup. The working name for the company is Acquia.

Thus, I'm starting a Drupal company whose current working name is 'Acquia'. Acquia's software products will include a number of Drupal distributions -- for community networks, digital media properties, corporate websites, and others. In addition to providing Drupal distributions, Acquia will build the Drupal-tuned analogue of the RedHat Network, over which we can deliver a wide variety of electronic services intended to be useful to people developing and operating Drupal websites. An example such service is an automated upgrade/update service, an uptime and performance monitoring / reporting service, a configuration management service, etc.

Does anyone else see the irony in Drupal's founder not beginning his first Drupal startup until seven years after releasing Drupal publicly? Think of all the developers, IT leaders, and companies that have prospered over the years from Drupal. In all that time, Dries has been very careful to not benefit more than others in the Drupal community. All in all, I think Dries has shown the highest respect for open source as well as loyalty to the Drupal community.

Already, some of the other CMS news related sites are wondering how the Drupal community will react to Dries' announcement. Comparisons are already being made to other open source CMS projects that have been torn between commercial and community interests. Take this CMS Watch post for instance: