Ian’s Blog on Open Source Marketing

Alfresco launched the Alfresco Content Community earlier this year to offer easy access to documentation, answers to frequently asked questions, sample applications, white papers, recordings of webinars, training material and presentations from community meetings. Open source communities are about two way conversations and when users join they are asked details on their preference for operating system, application server, portal and database. Newsletter surveys have also drilled down on user’s preferences and how they differ between evaluation and deployment. This information allows Alfresco to prioritize the platforms and combinations of platforms, in the modern stack, that Alfresco runs on.

It also allows Alfresco to perform scalability stress testing and benchmarks on key stack blueprints. This in turn benefits the community at large.

The information also allows us to look for answers to questions such as:

• How and where is open source growing?
• Is this growth different in different parts of the stack?
• Is there a clear leader in each element of the stack?
• Is usage varying between evaluation to deployment?
• Are there differences by geography? What are the trends over time?

Among the highlights revealed by the Open Source Barometer were:

Operating systems: Surprisingly, users evaluated Alfresco as much on Windows as they did on different flavors of Linux, but they strongly preferred to deploy production systems on Linux. Windows plays an increasingly important role in testing and evaluation because it is the operating system on most desktops.

Application servers: Users strongly preferred open source Tomcat or JBoss over the leading proprietary offerings from Sun, IBM and BEA, even in production environments.

Databases: Overwhelmingly, users test and deploy on MySQL with PostgreSQL a surprisingly close second for both evaluations and production deployment. Oracle was the most popular proprietary choice among the proprietary databases.

Browsers and portals: To access the Alfresco ECM repository, users preferred browsers over portals. And Firefox was the most popular choice among different browsers. When users selected a portal preference, 80 percent chose Liferay or JBoss Portal.

Geography: The US is leading the open source charge following by countries such as France, Spain and Germany where Government adoption is a catalyst for change.

A detailed report can be accessed at: http://Opensourcebarometer.org

The Community can be accessed at: http://www.alfresco.com/community/register/?source=community

The “Open Source Barometer” will be published twice a year and this blog will provide more regular updates on trends. So when you join the Alfresco Content Community what you say counts

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 11:16 am and is filed under Open Source, Open Source Barometer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.