Open Source Software

With this week's announcement that Blackbaud will buy Convio there have been many questions whether this will be good or bad for the nonprofit organizations both companies count as their clients. We have often had clients and other nonprofit organizations we come into contact with us ask about the open source tools we specialize in, and how they compare with the proprietary tools or Software as a Service offerings that they've heard about. One very clear difference is that the open source tools don't get bought up and consolidated.

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On the heals of our recently released survey that looked at foundations and their websites, I spoke with one of our clients, John Theodore, a Technology Officer at the Annenberg Foundation, about their choice to go with Drupal for their website redesign. The Annenberg Foundation, founded in 1989, provides funding and support to nonprofit organizations in the United States and globally. They have a number of web properties that serve different aims and programs. The Foundation decided to begin migrating their web properties from a variety of mostly proprietary or home-grown systems to Drupal in 2010. The work is ongoing and CivicActions is working with the Foundation on the project.

Why Open Source?

John admitted to something of a bias against proprietary systems based on the Foundation's experiences as well as his own personal history as a developer and vendor. Proprietary systems often don't communicate well with each other and thus become their own silos. Vendor and support options are also more limited for proprietary systems.

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Last month while conducting research for an upcoming report on Foundations and their use of Twitter, we started looking at what Content Management Systems (CMS) were running Foundations' websites. Our curiosity lead us to look at the top 885 Foundations with websites (based on endowment size), utilizing the Wappalyzer browser plug-in to determine how the sites were built and what technologies and services were in use.

A note on methodology: the list of Foundations and their website URLs came from the Glass Pockets transparency database. We used Wappalyzer during the month of December 2010 and looked only at the home page of Foundation. We were able to clearly identify the technology powering 478 of the 885 Foundation websites (54%).

Highlights

Here are some highlights from the tables below:

When we look at all the Foundations in our sample, Drupal is the front-runner among open source systems, but not by much. Wordpress trails in second, and just over half as many sites are running Joomla compared to Drupal. Most surprising to us is how few Foundation sites (just five) are running Plone.

When we look at the largest 500 Foundations, Drupal has double the Wordpress instances, and Joomla is right on the heels of Wordpress with just 3 fewer sites. In both samples, the proprietary web framework ASP.net powers the highest number of sites, however the lead is significantly smaller in the top 500 Foundation sample. Similarly, Dreamweaver drops from 10.51% of the full sample, remaining ahead of all the open source CMSs, to just 5% in the top 500 sample, a few points behind Drupal at 7.6%.

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On Friday I'll be running a session at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) hosted by the Nonprofit Technology Entrepreneurs Network, or NTEN.  My session "Working With Open Source Software and Vendors" will feature a few panelists with different perspectives on the topic.

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Last week, President Obama's administration released the Open Government Directive, or OGD, directing all federal government agencies to publish information online in an open format that can be retrieved, downloaded, indexed, and searched by commonly used web search applications. The Open Government Directive outlines these three core values:

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The NZ SSC has rejected Microsoft's offers for a new licensing contract. This is a big loss for Microsoft (Though I'm sure MS would have you believe otherwise and try to paint the picture back to front) and big win for NZ Government and NZ's IT industry.

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Vancouver is thinking open. A council meeting agenda calls for discussing "open data, open standards and open source software for all of its data and information resources," according to the ReadWriteWeb post linked above. The benefits of governments going open are immense and arguably fulfill the role of government in serving its people. Indeed, Open Source is, by its very nature, a form of digital democracy.

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What does Free Software have to do with ending poverty? More than you probably think. It is not just at the core of consumer products like the Android loaded G1 phone from HTC, or the One Laptop Per Child XO. Linux operating systems like Ubuntu are deployed by community technology centers around the globe providing access to the internet, and all the information, data and resources that come with it. The Free Software (while having $0 in licensing costs) also reduces the cost of hardware, and allows programmers to improve upon it, and share their improvements without fear.

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Google will pay high school kids aged 13 to 18 up to $500 for their participation in their newest endeavour to promote open source in the general public. Google Highly-Open-Participation Contest is a new programme that follows on from the success of Summer of Code. The first round is a bit of a trial and has only ten projects involved, and Drupal is one of them! The others are;

• Apache Software Foundation
• GNOME
• Joomla!
• MoinMoin
• Mono
• Moodle
• Plone
• Python
• SilverStripe

It is both impressive and interesting how many of them are web-content tools (CMS, web-application frameworks, wikis etc).

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Dries wrote on his blog recently that the Software Freedom Law Center will assist the Drupal Project on various licensing issues.

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