SilverStripe

Two Years of Open Source Goodness

Posted by Brian on 1 October 2008

As we approach the two-year anniversary of releasing our software under an open source license, I thought I'd write a bit about where we see things going. BTW, the official birthday of our open source software is 10 October 2006. Not sure how we're going to celebrate, but it's a safe bet there will be beer involved. 

What's been different than expected over the past two years?

• We are more aggressively focusing on a modular architecture for our product. This is purely pragmatic from a site-building standpoint. It makes things easier for us when we build sites for clients and we think it's good for the long term ease of extending the open source product in general. It's a long term effort we're maybe 70% of the way through.
• We are de-emphasizing the phrase "CMS." More and more of what we do is web applications where the CMS interface may or may not be involved. The CMS function in our software is still very important and isn't going away, but what we build goes far beyond traditional notions of content management. We've been using other words like framework, and Sapphire (the core of our open source product), not just CMS. The emphasis on Sapphire in particular will be increasing.
• The amount of global interest has been way higher than anticipated. From a magazine cover in the German PHP Magazin to doing the US Democratic National Convention's site, to the SilverStripe CMS being translated into dozens of languages,  and a bunch of stuff in between. The global interest in SilverStripe the company and SilverStripe the product has been astounding. 
• The adoption of open source in New Zealand government has been progressing faster than we thought it would. Thanks to efforts from our friends at Catalyst, our friends at Ministry of Justice, and events like the e-govt barcamp we've seen a very significant increase in awareness and understanding of open source within New Zealand government. At the recent Open Source Awards in Wellington, there was a lot of buzz around government projects' adoption of, and general interest in open source.

What's coming up on the horizon?

• Open source as the default option. We see an expansion of the current adoption trends of open source in business and government. Part of this increased adoption rate is how we approach the problem. In our view, business and government need to start with open source as the default option and make vendors justify why a proprietary solution might be more appropriate. This mindset shift is something we're close to today so I think if we keep pushing we can get there soon.
• SilverStripe software as a premier web development platform. This is something we believe in very strongly. We think we have a great offering that allows businesses and government ultimate flexibility and can power the most complex and leading-edge websites on the planet. The first step in the plan was to open source our software under the BSD license. That's been awesome for the product itself and for us as a company. Next, we're going to greatly increase community involvement in the open source product. In a big way. Announcements coming in the next few months.
• Open data, not just open source. We see the advent of open data as a monumental change in the software industry. Mashups of the past couple years were a test of dipping toes in the water. Once business and government stop using dreamy notions of cost recovery as reasons why they won't open source data they've collected, then there will be a tidal wave of business for heaps of players. We're talking about raising the water level for all boats here in that when datasets are released to the public, nobody can accurately predict the precise ways in which the data will be used, but it's well-understood that when you open up the proprietary stuff you're hanging on to, you enable people all over the planet to use your stuff in ways you never could have imagined. The New Zealand Geospatial Office has links to articles from around the planet that talk about this global trend. Also Laurence Millar, the government's CIO, mentioned the importance of open data when SSC won an award at the OS awards recently.

Well, that's a quick view of the past and future of open source at SilverStripe. Thanks for making the past two years a wonderful journey and here's to the future of open source. Let's keep the party going.

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