Open Source

If you have not heard, Drupal 5.0 went into beta last week. I had intended to write a little bit about the new features users can expect with this new version of the content management system. However, I've been so busy with a couple IT projects as well as some family events that I have not had time to even touch Drupal 5 beta 1.

Luckily, there are smarter and more dedicated people out there already posting about anything I could say about Drupal 5. The following are links to what I consider as the top three blog posts on Drupal 5.0:

The folks at Gallery, an online photo album organizer, are working hard developing the newest version of Gallery in the 1.x line...Gallery 1.6. Gallery 1.6 is currently at Alpha 2 which means that the software is intended for testing purposes and not for use on production servers. If your confused with what I just said then I recommend you wait installing Gallery 1.6 until it has been fully released.

InfoWorld has a very good article centering around this week's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo. In their article, "PHP event: Open source accommodation stressed" a few good opening lines to use as a teaser for the article:

Rather than fighting the open source wave, commercial IT vendors do what they must: try to ride that wave...

..."It seems to us from where we sit that there's really no choice," said Tim Bray, a Web-oriented generalist at Sun and a co-inventor of XML. "A substantial portion of the market has made it clear with their wallets that they want to deploy and run open source software."

"We can't go back. It's too late," Bray said.

"Or, perhaps, I should say that Oracle is firing a shot at the heart of Red Hat, and commercial Linux? This really, really ticks me off. Oracle's claims as to why it felt it had to make this move are BS."

- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, "Oracle's Red Hat rip-off", Linux-Watch, October 25, 2006

The online magazine CMS Wire recently posted an article titled, "Feeling Blue, IBM Courting Drupal". In the article, author Scott Frangos writes:

Hot off the gossip wire: IBM is falling for Drupal. Hmmmm. ECM leader IBM has developed a series of nine tutorials for Open Source CMS Drupal. And as it turns out, Drupal runs rather well on IBM Linux servers while plugged-into IBM’s DB2 Express-C database. The final tutorial covers just exactly how to do that.

"The first time I heard about Wikipedia, I thought, This has no shot. Why would highly qualified people devote their energies to an encyclopedia they couldn’t make a dime on?"

- Steve Fox, Editor in Chief, InfoWorld, September 4, 2006

A series of posts and questions on the CMS blogs are asking whether Microsoft should help finance the costs of open source projects. I have no opinion to give that would add value to this topic. However, I'm happy to give the rundown so far of the posts that speak the loudest regarding Microsoft and open source projects.

The thread of blog posts seems to originate with a post at Dave's Tech Shop. In that post, Dave talks about the need for Microsoft to better support open source projects. Dave's reasoning:

Last night, I was up late doing some administrative work for my sites as well as writing some posts. This was my attempt to procrastinate working on an osCommerce site that I promised someone would be done by the start of October.

For the first time, an alpha version of osCommerce 3.0, an e-commerce application written in PHP, was released to the public for testing. While this third alpha was made available to the general public, the first two alpha releases were made only available to osCommerce's community sponsors.

According to osCommerce, the "alpha releases are made to showcase the new features being worked on and to generalize a version specific for testing to help fix and improve subsequent alpha releases for a final, stable, secure, and production ready 3.0 release".

Some of the new features that are made available in this release include:

Packt Publishing announced the top five content management systems (CMS) nominated for their Open Source Content Management System Award. The top CMS eligible for the award in alphabetical order (not in order by most nominations) are: