ORIGINALLY POSTED ON 9 Nov

Well they were out a week ago, but I came across them today.

Since 2006, Packt Publishing has been organizing “Open Source CMS Award” for the best and deserving CMS.

The Award was split up into two main stages. The first being the nominations followed by voting. Nominations were open back in July 14 2008. Anybody was allowed to nominate a CMS. After a mother, the nominations were closed on August 25. Then, the Judges chose the finalists on the basis of the most number of nominations received and also on number of other factors including performance, usability, accessibility, ease of configuration and customization, scalability and security. Voting Began on 1st of September and ended a month and half later on 20 th October.

They had the following categories:-

1. Best overall CMS. -> The overall winner.

2. Most promising Open Source CMS. -> CMS which has the potential to become the best.

3. Best Open Source PHP CMS. -> The Best CMS written in PHP.

4. Best Other Open Source CMS. -> For CMS written in a language other than PHP.

5. Open Source MVPs. -> It is a new category introduced for the Most Valued People from Open Source Content Management Systems.

Note: The Category “Best Open Source Social Networking Content Management System” has taken a back seat this year.

Now its time for the winners:

1. Best overall CMS.

1. Drupal – Won this second time in a row.

2. Joomla! – Was the winner in 2006.

3. DotNetNuke – Replaced last year’s runner up CMS Made Simple for the third position.

2. Most promising Open Source CMS.

1. SilverStripe

2. CMS Made Simple

3. ImpressCMS/MiaCMS

Replaced MODx, TYPOlight and dotCMS who this last year.

3. Best Open Source PHP CMS.

1. Drupal – Defeated Joomla this time.

2. Joomla!, CMS Made Simple

e107 out of the list this year.

4. Best Other Open Source CMS.

1. Plone – Was the 1st runner up last year.

2. dotCMS

3. DotNetNuke

Mojoportal and Silva out of the scene this time.

5. Open Source MVPs.

A long list of 24 personalities including WordPress’s Matt Mullenweg, etc. Refer here http://www.packtpub.com/article/open-source-cms-most-valued-people-announced.

Originally posted on 08 December 2008

Piracy affects open source in several ways. Below is my one hour hard work discussing few points about open source, piracy and its affect on open source.
What is open source???
You heard about open source softwares like wordpress, linux, audacity, etc. Well these softwares are free and the their source code is readable and available to all.
A free software may not always be open source. Some softwares run under there own propriety licence and the source is closed(and are known as closed source). Similarly open source softwares may not alwas be free. If you are a blogger and use WordPress then you should know about the Revolution templates. They are now open source but are paid.
How does source code helps programmers?
Well, using the source code, programmer can modify and distribute it in his/her own way. But you gotta keep the copyright license.
“Piracy”??
Most of us are familiar with the word “piracy”. If legal words are to be used out here, I mean “Copyright infringement”. The word refers to illegal or unauthorized use of some kinda of material in a way it violates the owner’s rights. In short words, piracy means stealing or simply a crime.
Some popularly pirated softwares are Mircosoft Windows, Adobe Photoshop, vBulletin, etc.
How does piracy affects the free and the open-source?
Let’s start with examples.
Case 1 Are you a graphics designer?? If you are, you must be familiar with Adobe Photoshop. Now, I can bet that more that half of the designers would not have heard about GIMP. GIMP is a free open source software alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop.
Case 2 ~ 90% people out here are still MS Windows users. Linux is
1. better than Windows.
2. is free and open source.
3. has hundred of sub distributions.
4. it has better support professionally and from a large community.
From the above two cases it is clear that piracy is killing the scope of the open source softwares. Well, if you’ll surf the internet, you’ll find hundred of such examples.
These days piracy is widespread and is done on a large scale. You’ll see markets full of pirated items which you could get for free or for <1/10th cost of the original. This has become a business of its own. Today on every corner of a street, you’ll be able to find somebody selling pirated stuff.
Use of pirated softwares are not only illegal but they cut down the market of the open source softwares. When user can have a paid expensive software for free why the hell in the world would he/she use a open source software? The person will not even try to find a free alternate to that software. Some of the examples are listed above.
Open source getting popular??
Well, actually in the past few years the open-source has taken the lead in few sectors.
For example, wordpress is a software used by bloggers to host their blogs on their own. The software is open source and rules the blogging market.
Another one, Mozilla Firefox is best the internet browser out here and is going great guns is ready to take over Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (closed source) as the most widely used browser. Adding to competition are Opera and Google’s Chrome.
Does piracy affect the Giants??
I suppose, not much!!
An example again. Adobe Tools ( like Photoshop, DreamWeaver, etc. ) and Windows are widely used and pirated. But I don’t think Adobe or MS minds this at all. Actually Adobe/MS doesn’t have much expectations from people whom they know can’t afford the software. Their main target are large companies which buy their products in bulk.
Now the biggest question- Encourage piracy or open source? I’ll say, ” Its on you. . . . . “
P.S.
This is the biggest post of mine so far.
MyBB went open source a few days ago. It was under a propriety license but free.
MyBB is a free open-source alternative to vBulletin. btw, my site