Commercial software goes open source: concrete5 to debut at O’Reilly OSCON 2008
Portland Oregon - July 14th, 2008
Concrete CMS
was first developed in 2003 as commercial enterprise software.
Headquartered in Portland, OR, the Concrete team had always been
proponents and enthusiastic users of open source, but until this year had
only released full source code to their clients for a fee. Now at O'Reilly
OSCON 2008, concrete5 will be released to the public under the MIT
License, a popular and nonrestrictive open source license.
“We built our own CMS because we thought it should be easy for
anyone to run a website, and the tools available simply sucked at the
time.” Says Franz Maruna, CEO of concrete5. “From the get-go
we knew features like edit as you surf and WYSIWYG were key. There’s
a DIY ethic that we think is part of what makes the web great, you
shouldn’t intimidate your site owner with a complicated interface.
We prefer clients who want to get their hands dirty and
experiment.”
After years of selling their CMS to large
organizations, including the Ad Council and Fujitsu, the Concrete team had
a realization: they were losing sight of what mattered. Franz continues,
“we could have hired some slick sales team and kept hunting after
huge checks from big clients. Frankly as we all got older, building some
big corporate site became less interesting than many of the smaller
projects creative individuals came up with. Our team shares a passion that
open communication though technology has the power to save the world, and
we felt like we had a great tool that wasn’t getting in as many
hands as we’d like.”
It’s been approximately
six weeks since alpha versions of concrete5 started appearing on
SourceForge.net, and the response has been though the roof. Thousands of
copies have been downloaded and the Concrete team is answering questions
from bright developers around the world. Andrew Embler, CTO says,
“Every morning I wake up and get to see emails from people as far as
Japan, Brazil, and Switzerland asking questions and giving kudos. We've
always tried to offer solutions that are as easy for developers to develop
with as they are for site owners to use, and hearing compliments from
people who used to see you as competition has been great.” Feedback
from an international community has helped steer architecture decisions,
like the importance of multilingual support, and implementing Data
Portability efforts like OpenID, OpenAuth and RDF for data exchange
between concrete5 and other solutions like Drupal.
Even with
the code free and open, there is a revenue model surrounding concrete5.
While the entire code base is available for download at concrete5.org, a
separate destination geared toward small business offers pre-built
starting points for common challenges. “We firmly believe that great
web-design is a process not a product,” explains Franz. “But
lets be direct – for businesses like doctors, lawyers or even small
software companies – there’s a fair amount about a
site’s architecture and content that’s pretty safe to make
some assumptions about.” Just as anyone can go to typepad.com and
get a good looking blog live in a couple of hours over your weekend,
getConcrete5.com will let organizations easily create sites that actually
serve their business objectives.
“Going open source is
not at all what I expected,” says Kate Welch, Producer.
“It’s really exciting to go from a little shop in rainy
Portland, Oregon to fielding questions from around the world. Launching
our first stable release at OSCON, which happens to be in our own back
yard, seems like a match made in heaven!”
About Concrete CMS
Concrete CMS Inc
is based in Portland, Oregon and has been a full service interactive media
firm since 2001. They have worked for a wide range of clients including
Logitech, the National Guard, and Kettle Foods. They have a long history
of helping smaller organizations like Rock Camp for Girls and the
Wordstock Festival get online with a great web presence. The Concrete team
routinely wins Summit Creative Awards, was nominated for People’s
Choice Webby in 2005, and won Time.com’s #1 Site of 2007 for
Lemonade.com. They wake every day eager to make the web a useful place.
http://concrete5.org
http://concretewebsites.com