Free But Not Cheap: Open Source Content Management Systems

by John Harney

Open source content management systems (OS CMSs) primarily differ from commercial systems in that the source code is freely available; however, organizations that adopt and customize the code must in turn make their modifications freely available to the developer community. Companies adopting this source code to develop it themselves have no warranties and must provide all implementation, customization, and technical support (except for what can be elicited from the OS developer community). In contrast, organizations that hire commercial companies to customize and support the source code get all that for a price, backed up with a service-level agreement.