2002-08-21: I had a very interesting conversation with Nisheet from Netscape today. He heads the xml dom system and several other initiatives, and is now looking for ways to make the browser do more interesting stuff. We talked about how innovations happened pretty much on the server side (cms, j2ee, xml technologies) and that the browser is still stuck with basic forms for most of the gui.
Nisheet is eager to learn more about the content management open source community, and to figure out how to work with oscom to make mozilla a better platform for accessing cms. I mentioned xopus to Nisheet as an example for gui innovation, and we mused about ways to provide stuff like xopus for a wide variety of systems.
There is a lot of good technology out there in the browser that needs to be leveraged. Nisheet thinks that the interests of mozilla and oscom are well aligned and I have invited him to our mailing list so that we can start the dialog.
We agreed that discussions should be result-driven, and that we should start to look for issues that we can solve together rather than talk about interop all day 🙂 Going forward, we should ask ourselves what Mozilla can do for us, and vice versa. That may be a good approach to getting results.
Nisheet from netscape sent mail inquiring about OSCOM. Very cool. I should meet with him sometime to see what’s up. Since Mozilla supports webdav, it should be quite easy to integrate Mozilla into our interop soup.
2002-09-19:
OSCOM happens in a week. I am especially interested in progress in content syndication and exchange, the session I will be chairing with Michi from Wyona
2002-09-19: Do open source projects want to inter-communicate and share? This article asks this question in the context of OSCOM Interop, a new project to foster interoperability and sharing between open source content management systems.
by Paul Everitt and Gregor J. Rothfuss
Everybody loves the idea of the bazaar. Small, autonomous shops doing commerce in the wild, right in the shadow of the centrally-planned economy of the cathedral. But even a bazaar needs rules, right? Coordination and cooperation don’t always spring up out of thin air.
In the world of open source, developers wonder if KDE and Gnome will ever interoperate in a meaningful way. But first we have to address if the question is even legitimate. Should they?
This article discusses a budding effort towards interoperability between open source content management systems, while evaluating the question, “Why interoperate?”
Background
The market of content management has always been associated with the big boys. Large software, large consulting teams, and very large prices.
Due to a number of factors, this mindset is in decline. Smaller approaches to content management, including open source projects, are popping up constantly. The open source projects are attracting attention from mainstream analysts and journalists.
From this grew OSCOM, an international non-profit for open source content management. The basic idea is to foster communications and community amongst the creators of these open source projects. A very successful conference was held in Zurich earlier this year. Another is slated for Berkeley in September.
After Zurich, some of the presenters discussed ways to make future meetings less a parade of individual projects, and more a forum for sharing ideas and working together. This led to a discussion of interoperability amongst open source content management projects, particularly in relation to a Java Community Proposal for content repositories, created by and for the big boys.
To test drive our ability to tackle interop issues, the OSCOM folks are working on a single problem: a common way to give presentations using a “SlideML” format and a set of rendering templates.
Reality Check
We are eager to continue these discussions face-to-face in Berkeley. But we should also step back and ask, “Is interop a bunch of crap?”
It’s a serious question. Why should a project leader or project team do the extra work? Many of the best open source projects aren’t really architectures. They are programs that started by scratching an individual itch. Later in their life, if they live long enough, they realize the bigger picture and do a massive rewrite, thus getting an architecture. But rarely is this new architecture designed with the idea of talking to other, similar systems.
So interop can impose serious scope creep on the architecture of a project. Strike one.
Next, how powerful is the motivation for working with “the competition”? At the least, a project leader has little cultural involvement with other projects, and thus doesn’t have that good old maternal feeling that sparks late hours doing something for free. At the worst, one project can view another with condescension, envy, or any other mixture of emotions that come from the tribalism of balkanized projects.
Strike 2.
Finally, aren’t there already enough standards? Writing standards is a difficult process, one that doesn’t come naturally to open source developers with the ethic of “speak with code”. Shouldn’t we embrace the man-years of existing standards and focus on good implementations? (Note: the answer is “yes”.)
Beneficiaries and Their Expectations
We now have a stark, bleak picture. Thus, what is the driving need for interop, and who are its beneficiaries?
The first benefit is the “cognitive burden” that our projects place on developers. Imagine you are a consultant, and you have become an expert at Midgard. But you have a project where you need to work with AxKit. Atop the difference in programming languages, everything about the world of content management is different. Concepts, jargon, etc. If interop can give the tenuous grip of 5% commonality in approach, this can at least provide the mental connections to the next 25% of functionality.
The second beneficiary is customers who might have more than one project in use, or want to reserve the right to throw out their current project next year if they aren’t happy. Can they even get 25% of the current site’s content and configuration migrated? If not, then they are locked in. It is often argued that open source does not lock you in. But is this really true in a meaningful way? While it is certainly possible to migrate data between open source projects, or content management systems for that matter, it is by no means an easy and painless process.
The third beneficiary is the implementor of authoring tools. Imagine you are a developer at Mozilla, OpenOffice, Xopus, Bitflux, or KDE. You’d like to tie the client-side environment, where real authoring happens, into the server side environment, where collaboration happens.
There are over 10 projects presenting at OSCOM. If Mozilla has to talk to 10 different systems in 10 different ways, they will probably opt to talk to none of them. However, if the various projects agree to a thin set of common capabilities, then there is a basis for authoring-side integration.
But we’re all open source veterans here, so let’s cut the crap. Do any of these people have a right to ask for interop? This is open source, scratch your own itch, I-do-this-because-I-like-it territory. The time spent serving these beneficiaries could be better spent implementing Gadget B, which my mailing list tells me will cure cancer. Right?
Wrong, but first, let’s explore the hidden costs of the process of interop.
Hidden Costs
Doing interop is hard. It’s a lot harder than starting your own software project. Just review the mailing list archives for an interoperability project such as WebDAV. On and on, the messages go on for months and years. It takes time to distill the common wisdom from diverse perspectives into a standard that can have multiple implementations.
Harder, though, are the human issues. As we have learned with the SlideML project, you have to bootstrap a culture and a process. Most of the participants are used to being the big fish in their pond. So who is the big fish in a shared pond? How do decisions become final?
From a process perspective, standards require a different kind of rigor than software. In fact, the purpose is to render something that exists separate from the software.
Similar to the projects themselves, though, successful efforts seem to show character traits that combine intellectual confrontation with patient encouragement, with a strong dose of humor and enjoyment.
The Revenge of the Upside
We have discussed the reality check of interop, explored the beneficiaries and questioned their rights, and surveyed the hidden costs. So that’s the downside. What’s the upside of interop that makes it worthwhile?
The authors of this article are promoting the idea of pursuing interop between open source content management. We are advocates. So we’ll focus the article on the provocative questions of interop in general and thus we will limit the upside to one discussion point.
In the world of open source web servers, there is one project that has a majority of the gravity. For databases, there are a couple of projects that split the gravity. Same for desktop environments. But for content management, there are a trillion. This kind of market splintering helps ensure that the big boys are safe to dominate the mainstream, where size and stability matter more than innovation and revolution.
Interop efforts, such as the Linux Standards Base, reduce risks for the mainstream customer. Not completely, perhaps not much at all initially. But it proves that we are interested in the motivations of the mainstream.
But interop is not solely a “feature” to appeal to the mass market, it can also unleash many new possibilities. Consider XML-RPC, which brought interop to scripting languages, and is now baked into 10s of scripting environments on various platforms.
Possible Progress
The existence of OSCOM, the conferences, the budding community, SlideML, and the interop workshops in Berkeley next week are all signs that this interop effort is taking baby steps. At this early stage, we can all be prognosticators and foretell with 100% certainty the future. Choose your pick:
- Prediction One: Interop between open source projects is a fool’s errand.
- Prediction Two: If we stay practical and focus on small steps, we can provide value with lower risk.
- Prediction Three: We’ll stumble across the Big Idea that is the bait to get the fish (project leaders) on the hook in a big way.
- Prediction Four: Somebody will get sued over a patent infringement and we’ll all move to Norway.
Open Questions
There are no easy answers for interop, nor are the questions that need to be answered unique to the content management space.
How and when is interop “sexy” and arouses interest among developers? What can be learned from interop efforts that succeeded?
Is lowest common denominator functionality still worth anything? The choices are 100% interoperability (fantasy), 0% interoperability (surrender), or 20% interoperability (pragmatism).
Is 20% better than nothing?
2002-09-20: Seems like Mozilla wants to play in the cms space. By attaching itself to Mozilla, OSCOM would be taken on a very exciting ride. The usual cautionary notes about “dancing with the gorilla” apply. Very very interesting.
2002-09-24: amars:
OSCOM’s mere existence has got to be one of the most ridiculous things i’ve seen in recent times. with repressive governments killing their people, exploitive businessmen/politicians trying to reduce our freedoms, children starving, etc… there are better things to devote one’s resources to than a stupid organization dedicated to a stupid redundant cause.
There seems to be a point where one’s actions are visible enough to start attracting that sort of criticism. It is flattery in a weird way. Austin marshall raises some valid points. Will we be able to live up to the expectations that people start piling on us? Is interop worth it?
The more I learn about various cms, the more I get to value the content that is stored in them over the specific implementation that differs in each cms yet is still very much alike. Tastes and requirements change. I will start working on a java cms full time next year, besides my current interest in various php-based cms. I’m very much interested to take my content with me when I switch between systems. Indeed there are 100s if not 1000s of cms systems out there. It’s probably one of the most fragmented markets within IT. I consider my time working on interop well-spent, certainly much more so than creating yet another cms.
2002-09-26: OSCOM Day 1. Keynote
Charles Nesson mentioned that education needs open source. He encouraged the OSCOM attendees to work with him to bridge the digital divide in jamaica. He showed the audience a letter from a government official that strongly supports open source. The minister invites OSCOM to help jamaica build a digital infrastructure. Harvard / Prof. Nesson is looking for volunteers that want to spend some time in jamaica to help establish some of the infrastructure.
Midgard
Of particular interest is that Midgard has now been ported to ADODB, which makes a potential port of the PostNuke API on top of Midgard that much easier.
Paul on interop
Paul Everitt was giving his zope cookbook recipe again, but he then embarked upon how interop would change the game for open source CMS by pooling resources and making previously unrealistic projects feasible by sharing them within a group of cms. I’m glad he took the time to go into interop, he pretty much set the stage for the conference by doing so.
Bitflux / Xopus
A neck-to-neck competition between the 2 wysiwyg editors that both are so advanced that Netscape was impressed enough to promise to work on any feature requests that OSCOM would bring up. From a technical perspective it looks like Xopus has the lead, but the best thing to happen would be a fusion of functionality between the 2 editors.
Search Engines
Avi Rappaport talked about open source search engines and how CMS vendors should implement better support for last-modified date, metadata, and rss 1.0 support. It was promising to hear that Avi reached the same conclusion (RSS as a starting point for announcing recently changed pages).
Dinner
I talked at length with Lon from Q42 who complained that the open source release of Xopus had failed to bring new business their way. I pointed out that Xopus was still largely unknown in the CMS landscape, and that it may be feasible to get funding to build the next generation of Xopus.
I’m now very tired and still have to finish my slides / convert them to slideml.
2002-09-29: The conference has been a great success. I will need several days to digest all the new initiatives, and announce them to the proper channels. I’m VERY excited about the prospects. It looks like we will have another conference in march at Harvard, followed by OSCOM IV in Tokyo in September 2003.
2003-03-18: The sprint last week was a resounding success. We got a lot done, and had an awesome amount of fun. We now have over 40 proposals for OSCOM III, and daily subscriptions to the participants list. If we don’t totally screw it up this will be one heck of a conference.
2003-04-18: Roger and myself are starting to assume our roles as track chairs at the upcoming OSCOM 3 conference.
Roger put together a couple questions, and I just stumbled across a rather scathing comment on metadata. I wonder what our semantic web experts have to respond to that?
I just sent out these questions by email, as soon as I will get answers I will start to trackback these talks. I’m rather excited about the potential to have the talks annotated and commented on before they are even given, all aggregated in one place.2003-04-21: Marco Federighi had this to say about his talk.
Why is metadata, the semantic web important in general and for you personally?
For me personally, it has no importance whatsoever. For the web in general, metadata does the same job as chapter headings, page headings, footnotes and a good analytical index do for books. Ever tried to USE a book with a lousy index? Nearly useless.
How long do you think will it take that a web majority will use metadata, engage in the semantic web?
Majority of whom? Users will engage in the semantic web as much as their favorite search engines engage in it. Web authors will if they are provided with easy ways of adding metadata in a structured manner. Since this is OSCOM and not an academic discussion about the semantic web, the question is: can CMS help at all? That’s what I am trying to answer in my presentation. And, in case you ask, I haven’t got an answer yet ;-).
Do you see any hindrances in the adoption process? If yes, of what sort are they?
The fact that people will overdo it with metadata: add irrelevant, verbose, untruthful stuff by the bucket load.
What are the next important steps to take concerning metadata, the semantic web?
Engage “natural” audiences in creating metadata standards for their areas of interest. Scientific research is an obvious candidate, with metadata standards largely there already for paper publishing. The web was started at CERN to exchange scientific information; my wilds guess is that the semantic web will take off with online publishing of scientific papers. OK, bit of a professional bias there ;-).
Can you point me to an interesting project/person in this regard?
No. I come from the other end of the spectrum, CMS USE (not development). I am still very much a newbie there. Although, periodic chats with Susan Hockey are helping :-).
Maybe even a project/person who you miss at this conference.
Not really.
Why should people attend your presentation?
To discuss if CMS and the semantic web have anything to do with each other. My first reaction when the conference was announced was “what the heck has the semantic web to do with OSCOM?”
What should one know before going to your presentation?
Not sure yet. Having read one of the many online primers on the semantic web might help.
Do you see any overlapping with other presentations in Track One?
Not much, but as we get more comments some overlap might develop.
2003-04-26: I will be on a panel tentatively titled “you can’t make money with open source”
I will probably make the case for a relentless standards-driven approach, one that reduces lock-in for the customer, ushers in replaceability. Granted you may be replaced yourself, but you have to press on.
Sun touts open standards over open source. Initial thoughts: most open source programs don’t give a damn about open standards. They create their own puny data formats, and you are locked in for all practical purposes. Something that escapes popular notice.
2003-05-06: Paul and myself wrote an article based on our experience with OSCOM about the art of getting different open source projects and communities to work together, towards shared goals. I’m really curious to learn whether our thesis that open source doesn’t equate open minds can be supported by others.
2003-05-16:
Right now, a lot of cooperation seems to be focused instead on “interoperability.” In a recent article, 2 open-source veterans discuss how they have overcome their skepticism about early OSCOM efforts to foster more interoperability among open-source CMS packages. Indeed, some progress has been made on common standards. This is useful, but doesn’t solve the key problem of too many undead projects. Moreover, I believe that customers remain less concerned about interoperability between prospective CMS implementations, and more about integration between CMS applications and other enterprise systems like document management, print publishing, or asset management systems — many of which inevitably are commercial in origin.
To which i say, our interop efforts are exactly targeted towards offering a common interface to other applications. As i explained earlier, there are 2 different aspects of interop: between cms and other applications, and between 2 cms.
I largely agree with Tony’s analysis, and I believe we are on the right track.
The community could also be more active in adopting larger foundational efforts as the base of their systems — employing specifically the diverse Apache initiatives, from web server to repository. 5 years from now, it’s highly likely that buyers are going to choose from among CMS solutions built on top of 4 major “enterprise” families: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and Apache. Might as well start aligning with the Apache project now.
Daniel Veillard notes the similarities between the xml and open source communities.
2003-05-23:
The continued dramatic growth in content management systems (CMSs) and technologies there are 100s of CMSs, including 10s of open source tools has defied the usual rules of business software markets. The number of new product launches by old and new companies somehow still manages to keep ahead of the ongoing consolidation. This is very healthy. However, even a full-time market analyst paid to be a content management expert is not going to be able to keep up with all the products and features, especially since managing content involves technologies that go well beyond a CMS. Fortunately, there is an industry effort gathering steam to provide an open and free list of CMS products and features. This public domain classification will be based on an XML schema (CMSML) so that anyone can use the information.
article in The Gilbane Report on the OSCOM CMSML effort. I’m a coauthor.
2003-05-29: We are finally online. Jacked into irc, blogging can begin.. #oscom on freenode.net
Tony Byrne starts off with remarking that the commercial cms world is increasing their lead over oss. Why is that?
- Intelligent word copy-paste (amazing this one is #1 🙂
- intuitive versioning (very nice, marks diffs inline)
- visual workflow cues (basically graphically laying out the state of a workflow)
- browser-based editing of images
- pre-localized interface (basically the GUI is multilingual from the start)
- in-context editing (editing navigation on a page with propagation)
- dependency reports
- useful reporting (never logged in 🙂
- forms-based workflow (makes it easy to create ridiculously complex workflow, even has some wfml support for visio)
- 508-compliant output
- distributed user management
- integration with other tools (connectors)
- migration tools (tidy on steroids)
- brower-based content object development
- open architectures: container and repository independence
- real-time LDAP integration
- Separation of Management and Delivery
Whew. What a list. Very impressive. Will have to let this stuff sink in.
Tony ends with a manifest for oss cms:
- Fewer projects, more product managers
- move up the stack (no yet another repository)
- Create more common tools (Twingle, WebDAV..)
- Create a common lingo (CMSML)
Question: how likely is lock-in avoidance? Answer: The market pressure will bring vendors around, oss??
Question: Is the market ready for XML databases? Answer: Not yet. Sleepycat is urging OSS vendors to bake XML support in though.
This is a very good talk, I’m looking forward to the video.
2003-05-30: <bergie> Publishing is an engineering principle
<gregor> jon is focusing on his recent topic to do the simple things
<gregor> https://web.archive.org/web/20030603172734/http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/04/10.html
<bergie> The reward of providing meaningful titles is attention and influence, as your content is found more easily.
<gregor> there is no right unit of content
<bergie> This is a problem in blogging, as you might have many items on the same HTML page. What should be the title then? The date?
<gregor> heh, brent’s law of cms urls is brought up
<bergie> URLs should be “pronounceable”.
<bergie> Law of CMS URLs: the more expensive the CMS the crappier the URLs
<gregor> https://web.archive.org/web/20021019112409/http://ranchero.com/2002/09/30.php
<gregor> as usual, jon comes through with great clarity
<bergie> For organizing search results there are 3 main fields: HTML title, URL and the raw content, in order of importance.
<gregor> you can infer lots of metadata from URLs, doctitles
<gregor> this is rarely leveraged
<bergie> Title should also provide publishing organization, possibly site area.
<gregor> structure within the title tag can help to organize
<gregor> site :: area :: topic for instance
<gregor> you gain a lot from careful URL design. jon was able to gleam structure just by analyzing URLs at o’reilly and making assumptions
<gregor> which worked out
<gregor> consistency is low tech, high value
<bergie> CMSs should help content creators to understand and effectively use these techniques.
<gregor> mailing list information architecture sucks
<bergie> Subjects are also very important on mailing lists to make more useful mailing list archives.
<bergie> Why do mail archives always show just the subject and author? Why not a snippet of content?
<danbri> <bergie> Law of CMS URLs: the more expensive the CMS the crappier the URLs
<gregor> jon would like to see one line summaries of mailing list posts instead of just the subject
<danbri> lol
<danbri> so true
<bergie> Show what the email is about in the subject field
<gregor> ThreadsML is brought up
<gregor> https://web.archive.org/web/20030513180127/http://www.threadsml.org/
<gregor> weblogs reinvent discussion
<bergie> Unfortunately threading might break if you change subjects. Consider implementing ThreadML support.
<gregor> can’t we rethink how to name shared content while we are at it?
<gregor> q: what is threadsML?
<gregor> a: discussion is a portable unit of content. you could rip a subtree of discussion from a site and put it somewhere else
<gregor> seems to be tightly related to proper URI design
<gregor> REST style if i remember correctly
danbri hmms re NNTP and doing just that (shipping discussions around)
<gregor> hehe SlideML is being dissed 🙂
<bergie> “inventing new standards is a sign of weakness”
<besfred> hiya, is the keynote of jon is this the keynote channel ?
<gregor> yes
<besfred> 🙂
<gregor> dw: OPML
<gregor> q: what about OPML?
<bergie> We have 10s of XML formats but not easy tools for regular people to produce meaningful content with them
<gregor> a: powerpoint is an outliner too. aaron did a critique of powerpoint presentations based on tufte
<bergie> Problem with OpenOffice and PowerPoint is that while they’re easy to use they don’t allow meaningful web publishing
<gregor> LOL jon wrote his own slide formats
<gregor> “i’m of the geek tribe, so i had to invent my own”
<besfred> hehe
<gregor> CMS started out in the print world. web is 2nd thought
<bergie> <s:content>INSERT YOUR CONTENT HERE</s:content> is not for those who don’t use Emacs
<gregor> weblogs are the first medium truly for the web
<gregor> why is that?
<bergie> CMSs came from print world, things like deep linking were not considered.
<gregor> – deep linking
<gregor> heh henri 🙂
<gregor> we are still stuck in 1995-era linking technology
<gregor> universal canvas, another long running jon topic
<bergie> Editing UIs are too non-web-like, most CMSs either provide basic TEXTAREAs or IE DHTML Edit control (and Midas)
<gregor> https://web.archive.org/web/20030109124901/http://udell.roninhouse.com/bytecols/2001-06-06.html
<bergie> Things like drag-and-drop linking, image editing and table management is too difficult.
<gregor> an opportunity for a lightweight web writing tool (Xopus, Twingle?)
<gregor> “Microsoft does VERY interesting stuff in XML. consider Infopath, for instance.”
<bergie> There would be a huge opportunity for lightweight, web-aware writing tool that integrates with CMSs (Xopus, Twingle, Bitflux Editor?).
<gregor> What about compound document?
<gregor> “compound docs on the web are a deep & unsolved problem”
<bergie> Old-style desktop tools give the illusion that you’re only managing a single document (oscom.ppt) instead of several pages that require meaningful URLs and titles.
<zoned> udell rocks
<gregor> View Source is VERY important. Binary formats thus don’t count it
<bergie> Central lesson of WWW is “View source”, leading to “sharing is good”
<gregor> zoned: word
<zoned> he is pitching twingle
<gregor> he is pitching low tech
<gregor> i love that
<zoned> simplicity that enables rich simplicity
<gregor> yep
<gregor> being offline will go away, thus you may be able to solve the referring problem better.
<gregor> (still talking about compound docs)
<gregor> q: versioning with compound documents?
<bergie> This compound document problem might go away as everybody is connected and web becomes the primary content distribution forum (no need to email a single file, put it to floppy, etc).
<gregor> q: you seem to treat google as another UI
<gregor> a: yes, google is a very important UI
<gregor> refactoring on the large vs on the small
<gregor> CMS are good at the large refactoring tasks
<bergie> CMSs excel in refactoring “in the large”, like rearranging trees, make changes consistently across documents, handle access control
<gregor> suck at small tasks, such as capturing email threads
<Morbus> morning all.
<gregor> “XML-oriented outliner would help” (with smirks toward dw)
<bergie> However, CMSs are not good with “in the small” problems like capturing email threads, creating documents that synthesize content from existing documents, maintain and reorganize links
<gregor> jon is advocating the personal CMS
<Morbus> gregor: any word on video of the keynote?
<gregor> it will be processed
<bergie> XML-oriented outliner could help here (wink towards Dave Winer regarding OPML)
<gregor> jon is being taped as we speak
<besfred> w00t
<gregor> “how will normal ppl write the semweb”?
<gregor> heresy: content and presentation shouldn’t always be separate
<gregor> the value of categorization
<bergie> How will normal people write for semantic web? Idea: content and presentation could be combined.
<bergie> Categorization should produce immediate visual results.
<bergie> Tagged items should be reflected in many presentations like HTML rendering, URL, RSS feed, …
<gregor> https://web.archive.org/web/20030628160840/http://www.xml.com/pub/a/ws/2003/05/27/allconsuming.html
<gregor> as an example of leveraging categorization
<Morbus> (is this a transcript, or just idle talk?)
<gregor> transcript
<Morbus> thanks.
<bergie> An “all consuming” Amazon book aggregator is shown as example of easy use of categorization
<gregor> how do we make categorization seamless?
<bergie> We should be able to tell that “this link is a person, that link is to a product page”
<gregor> moving on to XML databases.
<bergie> Example: mark a specific item with a CSS class, then you can make it visually separate and locate it using Xpath
<gregor> it’s about “small pockets of structure”
<zoned> https://web.archive.org/web/20030107044619/http://www.netcrucible.com/blog/2002/12/20.html
<gregor> another notion from jon, the semistructured structure
<gregor> http://web.archive.org/web/20030422163255/http://archive.infoworld.com/articles/pl/xml/02/10/28/021028plxmlclient.xml
<bergie> slides: http://web.archive.org/web/20030811172202/http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/misc/oscom/intro.html
<bergie> “If I write a document and put in a quotation or code fragment, I should be
able to categorize it. The categorization should be shown visually”
<gregor> wow
<gregor> that was awesome
<chregu> yeah, great.
<bergie> agreed, and pitching Twingle 🙂
<Morbus> gregor: lemme know when videos go up. i am so jonesing right now 😉
2003-06-02: i’m back from oscom 3. the flight was a PITA, with 4 babies almost canceling each others cries out, but just almost 😦 oscom was great, and many good things should come out of it going forward.
for now it’s back to the slave pits though.
2003-06-22:
OET: What “lesson learned” from your SlideML project can you share about getting different Open Source projects to work together?
Rothfuss: There are 2 key ones. First, microsteps are preferable to lofty goals that you never reach anyway. Second, the same technical issues pop up in different environments, whether they be Open Source or commercial software projects. You just need to find a common language to recognize that you’re sitting in the same boat.
OET: What are the hazards a developer team should be aware of when they begin to introduce Open Source into a commercial enterprise?
Rothfuss: Not all Open Source software has a sufficiently large community to support its further development. In that vein, becoming a respected Open Source citizen takes some work, but it’s crucial for organizations if they ever want to roll back their modifications into the main line of development.
Also, getting support is much easier if a community respects you. This usually means organizations have to adopt a humble approach toward Open Source communities. For instance, IBM was not welcomed to Apache by virtue of its brand, but rather, each IBM employee had to prove his worth by valuable contributions.
Given enough resources, Open Source software, of course, integrates even better than proprietary software because all pieces can be molded as needed. So, for practical purposes, it makes much more sense to look out for standards support.
2003-06-25: I will be speaking about moblogs at Seybold San Francisco 2003 (Thursday, September 11). Meanwhile, Michi will be speaking about open source content management (Tuesday, September 9) at the Gilbane conference, which is part of Seybold.
2003-07-23:
The video from the panel You Can’t Make Money with Open Source at OSCOM 3 with Charles Nesson, Ed Boyajian, Ed Kelly, JT Smith and me is now online. Thanks bob for all the hard work to bring this online.
2003-09-03: Here is Tony Byrne’s presentation from OSCOM 3 that lists neat features of commercial CMS that are not yet available in open source CMS. A list for inspiration.
2003-09-04: Michi managed to assemble a nice crowd for the OSCOM sprint at seybold. Very much top notch people, I wonder what my role should be there 🙂
2003-09-10: I was just conversing with Lauren Wood who chairs the XML conference in Philadelphia in December. She is interested to have an OSCOM sprint on the show floor. We will try to make it happen. Also, Oreilly expressed interest to host the next OSCOM within OSCON (try saying that fast 3 times :). I guess I’m now firmly on the conference circuit. Say hello to air conditioned hotel lobbies.
2003-12-07:
OSCOM (Open Source CMS association) is organizing another “hackathon” to encourage development and — dare we hope! — inter-project cooperation on open-source client tools. Held during late January in Zurich, Switzerland, this hackathon, or “sprint,” will focus on various open-source authoring approaches, such as Twingle, Bitflux, and plain old Mozilla… sign up to participate
Amen, tony.
2004-01-23:
2004-03-03: We made some changes at oscom.org recently to increase customer satisfaction 😉 These include:
Planet oscom
planet oscom aggregates weblogs with oscom-related content. Send me an email if you have a feed that should be added. You may want to read up on category feeds as we don’t want to syndicate your cat pictures, just the oscom posts.
Self-serve oscom matrix
You can now request an account with michi ( @ apache org), and maintain the data for your open source cms yourself.
General mailing list
The general @ oscom.org mailing list is now open for business (again). You can ask and answer questions or make comments with regard to Open Source Content Management, and be informed on news about the next conferences, hackathons/sprints and other events
Upcoming events
We now list upcoming events on the oscom front page.
2004-05-22: I went and added more feeds to the planet oscom aggregator. For now, top-level feeds are oscom-related or main project feeds. I also created sub categories:
to do:
- integrate sub categories into main navigation
- list names of aggregated people
- add more project feed lists (as OPML preferably)
2004-06-15: The RFP for OSCOM.4 (Sept. 29 – Oct 1, Zurich, Switzerland) is now available. The theme of OSCOM.4 is “Cross-Pollination”. This will be a conference with assistance from the Apache Software Foundation for the ApacheTracks content. The conference will have 4 tracks:
- OSCOM Technical / Community Track
- OSCOM Business / Legal Track
- ApacheTrack 1
- ApacheTrack 2
2004-07-22: So it turns out that one of the proposals we received for oscom.4 was a scam from someone in nigeria to get a visa to switzerland and then disappear. I was wondering about the low quality of that particular proposal.
2004-08-09: Join me at the OSCOM hackathon at ACM Hypertext 2004 in Santa Cruz, August 9-13. We will work on interesting content management problems and hopefully interact with hypertext researchers from all over the world. The event is bound to be an excellent time.
2004-08-11: Registration for OSCOM.4 with Apache Tracks at ETH Zurich, Switzerland from Wednesday, September 29th – Friday, October 1st, 2004 is now open. The program has many interesting talks for people interested in content management and Apache technologies.
2004-09-29: I am helping to organize OSCOM.4 in Zurich.
2004-10-01: Motivated by Danese Cooper who named oscom 3 (and yours truly) as an influence to push corporate blogging at sun, we’d like to expand the number of feeds we carry on planet oscom. If you are a developer or user of cms (or of underlying technologies, such as mysql, php or apache) we’d like to hear from you.
2005-05-16:
Als Teil des LinuxTag 2005 wird es einen sogenannten OscomTag geben. In seinem Rahmen findet eine Konferenz zum Thema Open Source CMS statt. Ausserdem werden einige bekannte Open Source CMS Projekte in einen freien Stand des LinuxTag ausstellen.
There will be an exhibition of Open Source CMSs, presentations and panels. They are still looking for talks and if you have an Open Source CMS to present, get in contact with the organizers. While I won’t be there, unfortunately, this looks like it will be a winner.
More information can be found on the OSCOM site.
2005-06-23: My article on the state of open source content management is now available, via content-wire. The blurb reads:
Content management is no exception to this shift toward open source tools. Gregor J. Rothfuss writes about the current state of open source content management and identifies the important applications that will continue to evolve in the next 10 years. Rothfuss describes the progress on a standard for repository-based content (JSR 170) and the fascinating advances driven by software for online collaboration used by open source projects. Finally, he provides a snapshot of the leading open source CMSs – Apache Lenya, Midgard, OpenCms, Plone, and TYPO3. Based on the concepts and applications Rothfuss describes, open source projects will continue to challenge the market position of the traditional vendors by promoting open standards and innovation.
WHERE TO FROM HERE?
If you’d like to keep a closer eye on developments in the open source CMS space, there are many interesting options. For a start, OSCOM regularly organizes conferences and offers Planet OSCOM, a news aggregation service that provides news items from the leading open source CMSs. The CMS page at http://del.icio.us, a social bookmarking service, allows you to see what other people bookmark under the CMS category. I find this to be an excellent way to track emerging trends, or “buzz.” And this is exactly what I recommend you do: keep an eye on the open source landscape, even if you remain a buyer of proprietary software.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 