I was fortunate to be invited to participate in a panel discussion organized by Andrew Ross of Ingress. The panel from left to right Roger Burkhardt (Ingres), Jean Bernatchez (Enterprise Stewardship and Internal Services Strategies, Chief Information Officer Branch, Treasury Board of Canada), Dave McIlhagga (DM Solutions), me & Donald Smith (Eclipse):
Business value of open source panel discussion from Andrew Ross on Vimeo.
In this blog post I'm trying to promote a great opportunity and some great tools, largely be ripping off the text of Michelle Murrain, the Coordinator, Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI). There are lots of great non-profits in Canada that haven't been able to attend any NTEN events, but heck, webinars are open to the world, so hopefully more people will take advantage of them.
We've had a couple exchanges with clients lately where they wanted us to develop code for their Drupal site, but they wanted to own the code outright and not have it licensed under the GPL. I thought I would outline here some of the reasons why this is problematic for us and why it isn't part of our business practice.
Note: This article was written a few years back now and the web software options have changed considerably. Many people are now searching for information about evaluations of wiki's. Dan Bashaw wrote an interesting follow-up to this article recently. I generally suggest either using MediaWiki if that's all a client wants since Wikipedia has made the norm, or doing something more customized that we would set up with Drupal. If you need help choosing what type of application you need or support in setting it up, please feel to contact us.
