In the open-sourece space, there are In the open-so urce space, there are few technologies as prolific as Web content management. Some experts number these systems in the 80-plus range, and most would concede there are at least 50. One would think that this abundance of systems would satisfy just about any user interested in an opensource Web Content Management System (WCMS). One would be right.

Whereas there is no super-product that satisfies every user’s needs, focused products do a pretty good job. According to Tony Byrne, founder of CMS Watch, “there are as many open-source products as commercial products because there is a lot of demand.” And those needs are so different, it takes numerous products to map to that vast variety of needs.

Melissa Webster, program vice president for Content and Digital Media Technologies at IDC, says “there are a huge range of WCMS solutions out there – small vendors are still growing at 33 percent a year even in a down market. This just goes to show there are a huge variety of needs for Web content management. If you’re a university, versus K-through-12 education, versus a charity, versus a manufacturing company, versus a retailer, then your needs are obviously very different.”

Community systems versus commercial systems
That said, there are two general types of open-source WCMS, and their leadership defines them. According to Byrne, community open-source systems are led by nonprofit consortia or the original founder and have nonprofit leadership governance structures. Commercial open-source systems have commercial governance structures where there’s one commercial firm that has created an open-source product and surrounded it with an open-source community.

However, the commercial aspect dominates and governs the direction of the project. Byrne says often the project will sell commercial add-on modules or commercial support. It also tends to dominate the provision of that support but usually will work through partners for the actual consulting. Of course, open-source systems differ from proprietary commercial ones in that with the latter you pay for everything – software, maintenance, and support.

But there are some subtle distinctions buyers should consider when scrutinizing open-source systems. For instance, says Webster, proprietary commercial systems sometimes leverage open-source components such as the Apache stack, so some they aren’t 100 percent proprietary code. Some, on the other hand, offer true proprietary commercial systems but also are committed to open-source WCMS projects from which they draw heavily and sponsor, she says. These vendors may use open-source search engines and Web servers to round out their product, so the models are becoming more interesting and the lines are blurring, she says.

Feature Sets
Because open-source systems have been on the scene for fewer years, one would suspect that they lag proprietary commercial products in features. Surprisingly, this is not so. Over the last couple of years open-source communities have raced to catch up to these vendors and have been successful. According to Byrne, there are easy-to-install and use products that are perfect for small websites but don’t have a lot of enterprise features. Some even lack staging environments or workflow out of the box . Smaller customers like schools, however, view this as a plus because they don’t need all that complexity. At the other extreme, there are open-source systems with all the enterprise features of proprietary commercial systems. In this respect, says Byrne, “the variety of features in open-source systems nearly mirrors what you’d find on the commercial side.”

Solutions
According to Mick MacComascaig, lead analyst for Web content management at Gartner, however, “where open-source systems lag their proprietary commercial counterparts is in the area of solutions…. In trying to address all the needs of Web content management solution components, [open-source] WCMS developers concentrated almost solely on the technical aspects and horizontal orientation. [Opensource] WCMS projects therefore rely heavily on partners for vertical expertise and that is not always forthcoming.”

Proprietary commercial vendors, on the other hand, have placed an increased value and emphasis on the implementation phase around the building of solutions, he adds. They can therefore usually develop content-enabled vertical applications much easier than open-source communities.

For example, MacComascaig says Gartner predicts in 2009 that about 75 percent of marketing budgets will be slashed by about 25 percent because of the financial crisis. He believes “the proprietary commercial, established vendors will be able to capitalize on this and pitch their Web content offerings as an investment that will yield short-term high returns, whereas open-source software could in principle provide the same technologies on which those solutions could be based. ” The problem is, he emphasizes, that most opensource projects don’t have the marketing organization or the coherence in their communities to put those vertical marketing applications together.

Partners
According to Webster, “if an open-source community gets bigger, the hope is there will be a partner ecosystem around it. Customers that buy from the proprietary commercial leaders are motivated by the fact that there are ecosystems of partners around them – those could be implementation partners so the technical talent is available, or they could be integration partners so the system you’re buying is pre-integrated with someone somewhere to some of the other technologies you use whether that be integration with certain kinds of Web servers, databases, etc.” Once that ecosystem has reached critical mass, vendors cooperate to serve joint customers much the way it’s done with commercial products, he says.

However, MacComascaig adds, with open-source partners, the passion behind a particular community or project is not geographically even. A system could have been developed in Europe so community members’ interest might be less if they are located, say, in Australia or America. Proprietary commercial vendors, on the other hand, he continues, “tend to put more emphasis on a developing partner ecosystem and kind of follow the customers. If they need foreign presence they send folks or make sure the partner infrastructure exists in advance.”

Differences in organizational culture
Probably the most important factor affecting an organization’s decision to go with an open-source or commercial WCMS is its technological and organizational culture, says MacComascaig. For instance, if an organization wants guaranteed maintenance and support, open-source is a possibility if the community is large and active and speedily releases upgrades. But the safe bet is probably a commercial system. However, that means the organization will have to live with the longer term and more complex upgrades from that vendor.

The organization will also have to consider the availability of partners. If it does narrow its choice down to an open-source system by a vendor selection and short-listing process, MacComascaig says it then has to consider the regional reach of the candidates. This may require a compromise. It may be that technologically a community has superior software to other candidates but locally may not have partners who have the requisite expertise to deploy the system the customer wants.

Advantages of open-source systems over proprietary commercial systems
Despite the few drawbacks to open-source WCMS' already noted, there’s good reason for such demand and consequent development of these systems. Some are the general strengths of all open-source software, and some are specific to WCMS'.

To begin with, the source code is open to all developers, and they can modify it any way they wish. So developers can change it and customize it for their specific needs instead of waiting for a proprietary commercial vendor to include it in a future upgrade.

Open-source developer communities tend to be larger with broader skill sets than developer teams of proprietary commercial vendors. This means there is generally more input from the developer community and the code can conceivably evolve faster than propriety commercial code.

Open-source code is also free, though generally the cost to customize it to the user’s needs can be steep – sometimes exceeding the savings on the code. But MacComascaig notes, “if you have the right kind of culture and right kind of fit and available partners, then open source can be cheaper overall because you don’t have license or maintenance costs.”

Webster suggests that if you go the opensource route, it’s best to be a committed developer in the community instead of just a user. If you make your own changes that are not consistent with the general trends of the developer community, Webster says, then you risk becoming “a small amateur software manufacturer.” So as the code and community evolve, depending on how you made your changes, she explains, “they may or may not be consistent with future versions unless you are a contributor.”

Advantages of proprietary commercial systems over open-source systems
It should be obvious by now that open-source WCMS' compare well to commercial proprietary systems, but they aren’t a panacea.

For instance, Byrne says open-source WCMS tools are not as easy to use as commercial, proprietary ones because developers in open-source communities tend to concentrate on feature richness and sometimes get stuck in a developer’s mindset and develop for other developers instead of for the end user.

MacComascaig criticizes open-source WCMS'’ lesser emphasis on solutions. “There is a greater preoccupation in the commercial proprietary world on providing solutions rather than technological services for end customers,” he says. “The large leading vendors have a lot of experience in providing full-blown solutions, which means customers get verticalized technology, code that the vendor has created before from other projects with similar requirements, and bringing three-quarters finished solutions that vendors can modify for customers’ vertical or horizontal needs.”

He also says there are .NET offerings in the proprietary commercial world that are strongly aligning themselves with Microsoft and their technology, and this will improve ease of use for these systems.

According to Byrne, most open-source WCMS' are smallish in size, though he says many can produce large reference accounts if called upon to. This brings up the issue of scalability. MacComascaig gives the edge in scalability to commercial proprietary systems but says the larger open-source systems can scale as much as most customers require.

MacComascaig also says that if you’re an organization that wants maintenance from an open-source project and don’t want to search new modules as they become available, then the maintenance costs need to be taken into account or you might as well buy a proprietary commercial system. “If you look at maintenance,” he says, it’s about 18 percent to 25 percent a year, so that means every five years you’ve paid enough for the maintenance as you would have for [a commercial, proprietary] license. So if you want the security blanket when it comes to open source, think strategically, add up your costs for the three or so years, and take into account what you intend to do and the number of people you’ll need to do it.”

In summation, says MacComascaig, “One of biggest advantages of open source can be reduced costs, but you have to make calculations carefully and don’t think simply that you’re not paying for a license and therefore it will be cheaper.”

Reality Check
Knowing what to look for in an opensource system, of course, should not stop with the criteria mentioned thus far. According to Byrne, “what a reasonable buyer should do is not necessarily look at commercial or open source, but rather look at what their Web-publishing profile is and look at the commercial and opensource systems that fit within that profile and evaluate them according to the same set of criteria. I think we’ve been looking at open-source versus commercial as too distinct for too long when it’s really just a different licensing model.”

Particularly “in an era where our websites get more complex,” he adds, “the licensing costs of these tools make up less and less of the proportion of the overall expense of the project, so. . .over time their benefits subside.” In short, he concludes, “you’ve got to determine if your system is right for your needs and not worry so much about if the product has a licensing fee associated with it.”

John Harney (johnharney2@netzero.com) is president of ASPWatch, a consultancy for application service providers and software-as-a-service vendors.