The 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report showed clearly the ongoing dominance of PHP-based content management systems. While the LAMP stack may be the leader in the arena of web content management, it is certainly not the only game in town. For the 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report we looked at not only the PHP-based systems, but also the Java and .NET-based systems.
The 2009 Open Source CMS Market Share Report was released today and concludes that three brands - Joomla!, WordPress and Drupal - dominate today’s market. Since 2008, The Big Three have solidified their grip on the market, with Joomla! taking the lead in many indicators for the first time since the project’s launch in 2005.
Rumours of a pending IBM / Sun deal raise some interesting questions. What if IBM became the steward of Java, StarOffice and MySQL? The potential for a lot of good things, I would say.
IBM has a well-established history of supporting open source (and they also do a pretty good job at making a business out of it, too!). Over the years the firm has released large amounts of their intellectual property to the developer community and have leant their not-unsubstantial support to the Eclipse Foundation and the Developerworks program.
The inclusion of Sun's IP and expertise would give IBM a huge boost in the open source arena. Not only would the acquisition of Solaris give IBM a vital and powerful OS (and make it painless to retire AIX) but also the access to populist applications like StarOffice and MySQL would give IBM open source reach that is unchallenged in the industry.
One also has to think that IBM could do some interesting things with the combination of StarOffice and Lotus Symphony. Symphony is based on the ODF (Open Document Format) standard. Imagine a turbo-charged StarOffice backed by IBM. Think that might get Microsoft's attention?
As for Java, the combination of Eclipse, WebSphere and the Sun Java resources would bring the potential for creating a truly united and consistent Java development path, and would give Java a much-needed shot in the arm.
While this is all still speculative -- with a few arguing that the deal will run into anti-trust problems -- it is fun to imagine what it might bring.
My fave tech industry insider, The Reg, today reports on an IDC study that indicates the recession is speeding adoption of Linux. The conclusion mirrors what we've been seeing at water&stone as well, that is, while the downturn has lead to a few people deferring projects, many have not, choosing instead to consider lower cost alternatives.
As the study put it: "IDC has found that economic downturns lead to a reduction in spending, but not necessarily an equal-sized reduction in deployments. In fact, past recessions have helped to accelerate platform shifts that were in progress."
Note, this isn't a fluffy little single digit shift in trends -- a full 72% of the firms evaluated indicated that they "are either actively evaluating or have already decided to increase their adoption of Linux on the server in 2009." Perhaps more surprising: 68% made the same claim for the desktop!
While the IDC report is focused solely on Linux adoption patterns, I would assert that the conclusions are also relevant in other open source situations, for example in the open source CMS space. The same factors that accelerate Linux adoption are also speeding the shift to open source content management systems.
We've seen several enquiries of late that say, basically, "our budget's been cut so we'd like to explore open source alternatives for completing this project." From our conversations with other vendors, it appears that they are hearing the same sort of feedback from the market.
None of this should come as a surprise. Smart firms are always exploring options to stretch their budgets and achieve better ROI. This shift to open source is overdue. Solutions like Drupal, eZ Publish, Plone, Alfresco and Magento deliver advanced functionality at very reasonable costs. It just makes good business sense from where I stand.
I received a request the other day from someone interested in finding social networking-type resources focused on open source content management systems. A good question, and one that I thought might make a useful list of resources.
I did a bit of looking around at the larger networks and found the following. Please feel free to add your own faves using the comments function at the bottom of the article.
(Note: Updated 18 March 2009 with a list of Official Project Twitter sites.)
