“Okay so let me get this straight, when we first spoke it was $13k to own it, and now its free? Are you sure about this?” a dear friend and repeat client who runs an agency just asked me.
I get that you want to provide for your family, sooo what are you thinking?
Are we going to offer a “freemeium” model where you get crippleware for free and the useful parts in expensive add-ons?
Nope.
Are we going to have a different license depending who you are?
Nope.
Are we going have a donation button or something?
Yes, but it will point to our favorite charity, which can do more good with the cash than us.
So I give up, why do you think destroying your perfectly viable license revenue is going to provide stability and creative freedom?
Here’s what I see. The biggest challenge my crew has is bizdev. We’re not perfect at everything, but we sure can deliver sweet stuff and we improve every day, execept for sales.
We’ve only really won good gigs through word of mouth. We’ve tried just about everything, and without marrying yourself to a particular vertical, it’s very difficult to define a meaningful marketing strategy for a web/IT services company that wants to do “cool stuff.” From my experience you do your best, and try to cultivate as many life long associates and friends who will recommend you as you go.
As the network slowly grows, things get easier over time, but it doesn’t really deliver with security and creative freedom if it ties you to a limited local gossipy scene. (yeah i said it).
So while completely giving away something we have and can charge a lot for, we’re actually doing ourselves a practical favor. Sure, we’ll be giving up a revenue stream, but we’re dropping a expensive business development challenge that we’ve never been good at or interested in solving. We certainly will still spend some real resources to make Concrete5 known - but a lot of that can be our time instead of cash. Moreover, if what we’ve been working on all these years is really as good as we think it is, we stand to jump-start a process that would traditionally take much longer. I’m interesting in seeing what a larger open source developer community might contribute to the project from a code standpoint, but I’m hungry for their evangelism about concrete5 to their clients. I don’t need (or want) to own every dollar that is made off of concrete5. Why not just get out of the way and respond to opportunities as they arise as thousands of people deliver concrete5 powered solutions to their clients?
That’s the practical reason to go “free beer.” The real one is better:
Content management is a basic human right.
It costs next to nothing to write your thoughts on a piece of paper and nail it to a door, it should cost about the same to make a basic website without it having to be a blog. If we can do that, we’ll win one way or another.
[...] Actually Concrete5 has no just become so good, that nobody knew about it. The software was used at enterprise level for which you had to spend some good bucks. The conversion into open source — free software is nicely explained by the lines below on this post. [...]
I’ve worked with a few design houses that each keep their own proprietary CMS. They charge lots for the feature (£5k-10k - about $10k-20k) and it makes up a major part of their bottom line.
I’ve worked with their systems though, and I can tell you, each lacks really useful features. I’m not talking about a bit of validation here, or a shortcut to something there - I mean features that save hours and hours of repetitive, dull work.
C5 is pretty good on this front, and why I’m choosing it but if it were missing an essential-for-me feature, I can add it or improve an existing one. Open source allows people with vested interests in a product to help improve it.
As it happens, I do need a new feature and I’m going to sit down, learn what I need and make it happen. I’m also going to tackle a couple of (what I consider) bugs. And at the end, I’m going to offer all the source changes back to you and you can do with them what you want.
So the list of reasons to open source your CMS:
- More exposure for your company
- Better karma
- Feedback from massively more people
- Feature and security bug spotting
- Feature additions, and bug fixes from the community
The last three mean you could spend less time maintaining your product and focus more on its implementation.
Anyway.. Thanks for all your work on C5. It’s awesome.
I’m also using indexhibit which is a similar CMS but geared towards artist/creative types. This one has better community features, and amazing content editing.
like some people i’ve read about in the last 1/2 hour or so, i came across this via SF.net project of the month…. i’ve tried and used and been frustrated at just about any F/OSS CMS out there (and i have tried with all; drupal is the one i stuck with the longest), and frankly tired of having a “blog format” just so i can quickly put out a page that needs to get out *fast*, due to urgency of the situation. i haven’t played with it much yet, but what i’ve seen so far, i like.
i started making my own little thing, viewable at the site above, mostly for old pages that i’m porting from apache server side include shtml pages, to php, and man, i’m seriously considering moving to this instead.
if i can get my theme migrated to this within a reasonable mount of time, you’ll have me hooked.
There is no php/mysql (not only) oss cms that I did not install at least once. From them there are about 5 - 6 that I have use, 3 of them I have try to modify by my needs (Drupal, Wordpress CMSMS), but there is only one I stuck , C5. If C4 is explosive, C5 is more than that. Its the missing puzzle of the web 2.0.
There is no good support for multilanguage on cms market. If they support it, they support it bad.
I hope that This great tool will support as it should be. When I read in english I read in english, and when I read in German I read in German. No mix please :).
Franz, THANKS. You earn a part in history of internet.
I’m in….
david allen
10 Jul 08 at 10:32 am
[...] Actually Concrete5 has no just become so good, that nobody knew about it. The software was used at enterprise level for which you had to spend some good bucks. The conversion into open source — free software is nicely explained by the lines below on this post. [...]
Concrete5 — A NextGen Open-Source CMS » Chopad
20 Jul 08 at 6:35 am
I’ve worked with a few design houses that each keep their own proprietary CMS. They charge lots for the feature (£5k-10k - about $10k-20k) and it makes up a major part of their bottom line.
I’ve worked with their systems though, and I can tell you, each lacks really useful features. I’m not talking about a bit of validation here, or a shortcut to something there - I mean features that save hours and hours of repetitive, dull work.
C5 is pretty good on this front, and why I’m choosing it but if it were missing an essential-for-me feature, I can add it or improve an existing one. Open source allows people with vested interests in a product to help improve it.
As it happens, I do need a new feature and I’m going to sit down, learn what I need and make it happen. I’m also going to tackle a couple of (what I consider) bugs. And at the end, I’m going to offer all the source changes back to you and you can do with them what you want.
So the list of reasons to open source your CMS:
- More exposure for your company
- Better karma
- Feedback from massively more people
- Feature and security bug spotting
- Feature additions, and bug fixes from the community
The last three mean you could spend less time maintaining your product and focus more on its implementation.
Anyway.. Thanks for all your work on C5. It’s awesome.
Oli
2 Aug 08 at 3:07 am
thanks!
i think i saw you on #concrete5 in efnet, its great to have the help!
Franz
2 Aug 08 at 8:58 am
I’m currently installing it.
my.eggtea.com
I’m also using indexhibit which is a similar CMS but geared towards artist/creative types. This one has better community features, and amazing content editing.
<3
Tony | eggtea
8 Aug 08 at 12:19 am
like some people i’ve read about in the last 1/2 hour or so, i came across this via SF.net project of the month…. i’ve tried and used and been frustrated at just about any F/OSS CMS out there (and i have tried with all; drupal is the one i stuck with the longest), and frankly tired of having a “blog format” just so i can quickly put out a page that needs to get out *fast*, due to urgency of the situation. i haven’t played with it much yet, but what i’ve seen so far, i like.
i started making my own little thing, viewable at the site above, mostly for old pages that i’m porting from apache server side include shtml pages, to php, and man, i’m seriously considering moving to this instead.
if i can get my theme migrated to this within a reasonable mount of time, you’ll have me hooked.
SimonRaven
26 Oct 08 at 2:03 am
Thank you for a great software! I definitely recommend to all my friends and customers to go for C5.
Tanx again.
Have a great day!
http://www.icaspian.net
Caspian
7 Feb 09 at 5:25 am
Designers paradise period.
There is no php/mysql (not only) oss cms that I did not install at least once. From them there are about 5 - 6 that I have use, 3 of them I have try to modify by my needs (Drupal, Wordpress CMSMS), but there is only one I stuck , C5. If C4 is explosive, C5 is more than that. Its the missing puzzle of the web 2.0.
There is no good support for multilanguage on cms market. If they support it, they support it bad.
I hope that This great tool will support as it should be. When I read in english I read in english, and when I read in German I read in German. No mix please :).
Franz, THANKS. You earn a part in history of internet.
Flak
17 May 09 at 2:43 pm