I’m new to EE so I haven’t delved into all the code just yet, but I don’t see any closed-source code. Therefore wouldn’t there be a good opportunity for EllisLab to promote/support a community core-development team that could work on core enhancements. Naturally this would need to be well managed to reduce wasted dev time, but it seems to have potential.
Great discussion as these are issues we all face. Government policies in many countries is to go open source, if far from all do that, as proprietary solutions cost tax payers millions of dollars/euros/sek. But, EE is NOT a proprietary solution. It is open source, but with a license. It is COSS not FOSS. The source code is open, PHP devs can add, extend and do what they want (except redistributing it), clients don’t have to buy themselves out.
I’ve worked in institutions that would pay some $10,000 for a new template in a propietary CMS, even if it was an ordinary template you can cut and paste. And when they want to change developer, they have to pay millions to opt out. This is insane.
The thing is to get it across that EE is not a proprietary solution but open source with a license, that the client owns the license(s) - and I always let clients buy their licenses so that they know that is they and not I or EllisLab who own their site.
It’s hard, I know, most people see the choice as a choice between proprietary solutions and open source, between paying and having it for free, but how free are other *free* open source solutions? See Paul B’s comment above.
I’m new to EE so I haven’t delved into all the code just yet, but I don’t see any closed-source code. Therefore wouldn’t there be a good opportunity for EllisLab to promote/support a community core-development team that could work on core enhancements. Naturally this would need to be well managed to reduce wasted dev time, but it seems to have potential.
Great discussion as these are issues we all face. Government policies in many countries is to go open source, if far from all do that, as proprietary solutions cost tax payers millions of dollars/euros/sek. But, EE is NOT a proprietary solution. It is open source, but with a license. It is COSS not FOSS. The source code is open, PHP devs can add, extend and do what they want (except redistributing it), clients don’t have to buy themselves out.
I’ve worked in institutions that would pay some $10,000 for a new template in a propietary CMS, even if it was an ordinary template you can cut and paste. And when they want to change developer, they have to pay millions to opt out. This is insane.
The thing is to get it across that EE is not a proprietary solution but open source with a license, that the client owns the license(s) - and I always let clients buy their licenses so that they know that is they and not I or EllisLab who own their site.
It’s hard, I know, most people see the choice as a choice between proprietary solutions and open source, between paying and having it for free, but how free are other *free* open source solutions? See Paul B’s comment above.
Some excellent discussions going on here, and I think the above , and 16 Toads comments have really hit the nail on the head - its not about license costs, it’s about the perception (especially in a global recession where a govt’s has to be seen to be cutting budgets and being more open, ie transparent).
Just a crazy idea, but if all these big gov’t organisations see EE as not being OpenSource simply cause the presence of a price tag which technically means we cant be called truely OpenSource… why not just do away with the price tag and swap it for “tech support” (or whatever you wanna call it) for that particular license code… at, say, a price of $300 a installation.
This could cover what we all experience now, and is realistically what we fall back on when something doesnt work.
For people that wanna try it, they can use EE for free, with no tech support.
This would then also scale far more easily to enterprise level of say $1000+ per license so those big govt organisations still get their OS CMS they seem to be into, us devs get the increased tech support level in accordance with the project budget, and EE no longer gets held back by the unhelpful label of not being OS to the people that get pedantic about it.
There may well be a very big, logical reason this wont work - happy to be wrong
to be honest though… when most people talk about open source, they are not talking about being able to see and modify the source code. The expressionengine licence does not allow the common definition:
Denoting software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed with or without modification.
You cannot redistribute a modified expressionengine for free or sale.
True… kinda feels like Open Source is a bit of a misunderstood, red herring of a term that is used in many different ways, often incorrectly.
Kinda like AJAX… or HTML5.
Trendy buzz words that have lost their meaning.
Though, when you want to provide a client with a fully localized install, you have to modify a bunch of .lang files, though not in EE itself, rather in those $300+ add-ons.
Sorry to be perhaps a little off-road on this thread, I definitely love it!
Apologies if someone else has mentioned this but one thing I feel EllisLab and EE would benefit from is having a product evangelist. Everyone knows that anyone that has used EE swears up and down by it (for the most part) but that’s not necessarily the product evangelist I’m talking about. EL needs someone who’s sole purpose is to get out and talk to large organizations and explain the benefits of the platform straight from the horses mouth so we, as developers, aren’t facing a total uphill battle as Paul Burton described of having a great solution that has zero penetration in the minds of the decision makers. Obviously there would need to be a strategy in place to make sure this person (these people) attend the right conferences and meet with the right people but I really believe this would help.
I, too, have had many situations where the client has essentially said “We want a WP site” and, fortunately, I’m usually able to sway them by doing a side by side comparison and showing them some key screens in the CP. I do this with screenshots or controlled presentations so they don’t see all of the lame parts of the CP and really get a good feel for how it works rather than logging in and being overwhelmed with a completely new experience.
I’m not a big fan of WP for the various reasons stated in this post and others but I also have no problem suggesting that a client that “just wants a blog” use WP or even tumblr or something much easier/cost effective if that’s what the client really wants (read: they usually want something more than a blog). Outside of WP having a tremendous amount of marketshare, Matt Mullenweg is the face of wordpress and that helps. Sure, we have Leslie and he is quite approachable and easy to talk to but outside of our little community, I don’t know how many people know of Les. Again, this is where a very charismatic (not saying you’re not, Les, but you have other fish to fry) product evangelist could get more people to consider EL / EllisLab / CodeIgniter, etc.
I get the feeling that within the community there still resides some tension even after the ‘kennygate’ mia culpa by ellislabs.
From what I have seen ‘kennygate’ put a rocket up elislabs backside and things have moved on, but perhaps not as quickly as some would have preferred.
I’ve spent the last hour or so reading through this thread and there is little that I can disagree with, there are many valid points, many valid arguments.
The first point I would like to raise is the state of the ExpressionEngine forums. They are dead. They used to be a vibrant community where users and developers interacted. With the transition from EE1 to EE2 Ellislab cut this and moved the developers to third party sites.
GetSatisfaction sucks, do you hear that Brandon, GET SATISFACTION results in no satisfaction. At least under the ExpressionEngine forums you could search for problems with various extensions, addons etc and if the answer was not obvious use the information to manipulate or hack it until a fix came along.
Ellislabs basically turfed out all their developers. Masuga had the presence of mind to create a repository and a central point for getting addons but that was initially off his own back, ellislab support was only given latterly. If you look at the devotee support forums very few devs respond.
I’ve also got to thank Ryan Masuga for spending a great deal of time explaining how he on a project (non ellislabs/devotee)converted EE1 galleries into EE2 galleries, something that Ellislab has been promising for more than 2 years now?
Ellislabs re gallery conversion, buy Channel Images, work with that for conversion, or give up, 2 years waiting for a conversion tool, put up or shut up.
I’m against the idea of anyone freely weighing in to ‘improve’ the core of ExpressionEngine. What you might term as improvement could be seen as a sideways or even a backwards step in terms of code quality, compatibility and future planning. At least as third party add-ons, I have the choice to use it, remove it and look for another or even code my own but always knowing there is a baseline to start from.
My gripe is with existing 1st party functionality being left at v1.0 (so to speak) in terms of extensibility such as pagination. It’s been talked about for years but for some reason no one has said “Lets actually fix this bloody issue and then hand it to third party devs to make it better still”.
I’m really hopeful for the EE Reactor group as I know the people involved are top, top developers which rely on ExpressionEngine for an income and so have a vested interest in making it great while keeping in line with EllisLab’s vision and roadmap.
I really wish I could be at EECI to see what’s cooking but I’m hoping that Leslie can write me a little email with some bullet points to keep me happy!
I’ve been out of the EE community forums for a while. Are there any links you can point me to to learn a bit more about this EE Reactor? Can’t seem to find anything on it.
I agree whole-heartedly about the critical requirement for massive technical marketing/evangelism by EllisLab, with the entire community helping as able. This is the third leg of a stool whose other legs are nailing, finally, a rock-solid 2.X core/CP and instituting a top-notch, refreshed support structure.
Even if every gov’t opportunity were lost (won’t be), the potential for EE growth as a commercial product whose clients may control their own source code remains tremendous. Digression? My wife is an ARNP (advanced nurse-practitioner). The demand for a maturing web-centered development platform like EE in the coming years to support health care professionals, whichever ‘Xcare’ model prevails, will be tremendous. Ditto several other industries worldwide. Web-based CMS platforms are still in their infancy. This is hardly a zero-sum game.
I don’t offer any of this as criticism, since I suspect we are all in agreement on the growth potential ahead for EE. Nor would I be upset if EE went open-source. I just don’t feel it is critical or inevitable and that the risks in overturning the vendor/community’s established culture would be unexpectedly large, perhaps adverse. Consider what happened when EllisLab committed to rewrite EE for 2.X and, by analogy, map that to a future move from commercial to open source.
Net, I am for EllisLab, EE and the community defining itself on its own terms in the coming years. After all, open source itself may be viewed as ‘old news’ with respect to future licensing needs, which partly explains why governments, the most reactive technologists in the galaxy, have embraced open source as though having made a remarkable discovery. Thankfully, while governments are forever trying to ‘mandate’ this-or-that requirement, they have always (to my memory) failed wholly to do so, probably because they are in conflict with some yet-unsurfaced software variant of Moore’s law for hardware.
There is something wonderful, frustrating, sloppy and yet amazingly powerful about the ‘partnership’ between EllisLab and its developers. Understanding who we are more deeply and nurturing the community accordingly may seem small potatoes day-to-day, but what if the ‘strange attractor commerciality’ of EE is its secret sauce that cannot be copied by others? That and rapid bug-fixes ...
(1) Licensing costs for EE are low, even with a few hundred extra bucks for 3rd party add-ons, and these costs seldom make a client go “Woah, I was good with $20,000…but $20,500? We’re out.”
(2) Perception is everything. People use mental shortcuts all the time to make decisions when they have little information. If a decision maker has merely heard of Drupal, they’re more likely to prefer it to other options, unless educated otherwise. I agree that EE is excellent, but perhaps relatively unknown in some circles. It’s like running for president. A candidate with history, like Romney, probably stands a much better chance than a newcomer like Perry, simply because his name is familiar.
FWIW, we recently put out a bid for a government contract that specifically requested ExpressionEngine, so there’s hope in this arena
Edit: I posted the above in response to a post from page 3, without realizing there was another entire page of comments…
