In Oh, What a Tangled Web..., University Business has a feature describing the need for content management systems on college campuses. Only wait? The feature focuses almost exclusively on expensive proprietary systems. Can't imagine that any CMS is worth $25,000 plus $5,000 a year in maintenance cost with so many good open source apps out there. Bowling Green's and Gonzaga's new websites could easily be done with many open source solutions. I would have built Gonzaga's expensive site for them with Drupal for 1/10 the cost. 'Course the open source development communities and consultants aren't going to come take a dean or IT director out to dinner and give them all kinds of other perks ;)
Disclaimer: I don't want to suggest that this is what happened at these institutions, but I suspect that open source CMS developers need to do a better marketing job and get their apps out there in the public eye and in whatever trade journals are featuring these needlessly expensive alternatives.
Or you could charge them the
Or you could charge them the $25K and take us all out to one hell of a dinner. I am still baffled by the "if it costs more it must be better mentality"!
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Wow, Charlie. I really feel sorry for these deans who are now the laughingstock of so many IT departments--who could have easily built their own CMS from scratch for cheaper than that. Heck, *I* could build a CMS, and I'm far from a professional web programmer. However, I would never be so silly, because, as you say, so many wonderful open source solutions already exist that could easily and legally be "tweaked" to accomodate any special needs.
I agree with you--I bet some high pressure sales tactics were leveraged in this case. I know the book publishers will stoop to nothing--"booth babes," (I wonder if there are also "booth hunks"?) free lunches, free drinks, whatever it takes to lure people over.
Probably the only way open source solutions will work in these situations is if a private company offers an "installation and maintenance package" at a high price and then obscures the fact that they're using open source packages. Steak or sushi dinners for the deans are NOT optional.
I disagree
Private companies like Bryght are gaining clients and will continue to do so by selling open source as a better, more customizable, more economical software solution. Because selling open source solutions is fairly new in the history of capitalism, we just need to give it more of a chance to catch on.
Surely the salaries of the programmers would be higher?
Actually, don't you think it'd easily cost more than $25000 to customise, install and maintain an open source CMS in a medium-sized to large university?
My university uses an open source CMS and I believe there are two or three full time support people maintaining on the system (there are about 20,000 students using it), and their salaries are clearly a lot more than $25000.
I think we SHOULD use open source systems at universities, because of openness, the ability to customise the system, and the ethics of it all, and I think universities should give back to the open source community by releasing mods to the systems, too, but I don't think cheapness is a very good argument.
Actually the open source CMS our uni uses sucks. It's too rigid, it struggles to cope with 20,000 +++ users, and it's surprisingly insular for an open source system (no RSS feeds of class info or anything like that). I'm still happy we didn't go for a proprietory system, but open source is neither necessarily cheap nor good.
neither necessarily cheap nor good
Sure. Which CMS determines how much customization there needs to be. Same would be true for a proprietary system, except the pay would be going to the vendor. But with Gonzaga's website, it looks to be very simple, just serving a bunch of static content. Nothing overly complex. The most time in setting up a site like that would be making the IA decisions about how to organize things and then putting in all the content. Wouldn't require any customization except for the theme design.
If I pay you for it, then I can blame you for it . . .
I think that this mentality explains a lot of why so many institutions and businesses will always prefer to use proprietary OS's, software, and web development/maintenance. Management people are often simply more comfortable with a fiduciary relationship. And if you can pay someone as a consultant to tell you which person to pay for software -- all the better when something goes wrong.
I don't want to sound negative, but this is a pervasive mindset within management culture.
paid consultants
Oh, sure. This is a good point against in house open source software support. Hire an open source consultant to blame.
Many CMS's are even more expensive
Last I checked, Blackboard cost twice that. To be a little more accurate, the last I checked was a couple years ago, but then Bb was $60-65K per year, depending on what extras were involved. I am sorry to report that Colby has opted for a proprietary CMS, Common Spot, despite pitches for Drupal and Sakai.
There is still a mistrust of open-source at the enterprise level. Administrators are fond of professional tech support, and are are still not ready to think of a FOSS developer community as reliable despite all the evidence to the contrary that suggests open source development is in fact more reliable, more secure, and versions faster. Sorry Charlie, I tried.
the sad status quo
in response to Matt's comment: Actually, I don't think that they are seen as laughing stocks by their peers (yet). I don't know about R1's but at liberal arts colleges, most IT directors think of expensive CMS as an unfortunate inevitability. No one's a laughing stock because everyone is in the same boat. Bb and WebCT are becoming a part of the landscape, and are seen as a necessary evil. Unfortunately once an institution commits to one, their hooks are in and the classic stovepiping phenomena inevitably follow.
trying
glad to hear someone is trying. that's the main thing. i just talked to someone at CCCC and they were able to convince their school to go to Sakai and use a consultant that specializes in open source software.