Daniel Chalef

New Website, Optaros EOS Directory and Packt Publishing Award Nominations

New Website and Creative Commons Licensing

We finally got our fancy new website out this week thanks to our intrepid team of engineers and designers (thanks JP, Fortunate, Philip and Wireframe & Sunday Media!). Our new website and all of our documentation and marketing materials now carry a Creative Commons Attribution Deed logo. Yes, we’ve licensed out the very great majority of our non-software IP under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Why have we decided to do this? KnowledgeTree is all about simplicity and open source. In fact, we feel so strongly about promoting simplicity and freedom that we positively want you to copy, distribute and display all of our copyrighted works — and derivative works based upon them — provided you give us credit. Adapt our user documentation for use within your organization, utilize our marketing material to champion KnowledgeTree in your local business community or utilize our developer documentation as the basis for documentation for your own KnowledgeTree-related product.

Our new website was developed using Drupal, a sister PHP-based CMS to KnowledgeTree. This was my first experience at using Drupal and I’m extremely impressed and pleased. I got my hands (quite) dirty with much of the content generation and was very pleasantly surprised how easy Drupal was to use, how powerful it was and the great open source ecosystem that has developed around it. Talking about ecosystem, KnowledgeTree and Drupal are complimentary products: KnowledgeTree is focussed on document management and Drupal web content management. As a result of this fit, a Drupal community member has already developed a Drupal module that integrates with KnowledgeTree.

Optaros Enterprise Open Source Directory and KnowledgeTree

Optaros, an open source consulting and systems integration firm, has listed KnowledgeTree on their new Enterprise Open Source Directory (EOSD). The directory is a listing of robust, enterprise ready open source software and only 260 out of a total of 140000 known open source projects have made the grade. The directory provides the community with an opportunity to rate software, upload case studies and provides guidance on aspects of using open source software.

KnowledgeTree was included in the original “paper” Enterprise Open Source Catalogue document. At that time we started a discussion with Optaros around how commercial open source applications such as KnowledgeTree should be rated in such a guide. Stephen Walli recently launched a new Podcast and the first episode episode covers the launch of the EOSD and interviews with the Optaros guys. He also interviewed Stephen O’Grady from Red Monk and me (thankfully Stephen edited out all of my “uhms!”). The podcast is well worth a listen and I am sure Stephen will have many more quality podcasts to come.

Dave Gynn at Optaros asked me recently to comment on the EOSD’s approach to non-OSI approved open source licenses. I think the approach they’re taking with respects OSI-approved licenses is both a pragmatic and fair one. I’m sensitive to the arguments either way regarding non-OSI-approved licenses. Many of the EOSD’s visitors won’t be as sensitive to downstream freedoms and interpretations of Open Source Defintions as the folks on the OSI’s license-discuss mailing list but indicating OSI approval for a project’s license would be helpful to those that are. Raising awareness is also an important aspect.

What I think they may find difficult and contentious is attempting to describe where a particular license may be interpreted to fall foul of an OSD. There may in fact be a significant opportunity cost for their team in doing so (from a resource and marketing perspective). If OSI license-discuss as a forum is anything to go by, I certainly wouldn’t like to have to manage their discussion forums once they put this in place!

We currently have software licensed under the KnowledgeTree Public License, the GPLv2 and BSD licenses. We’re contemplating other licenses but more on this in the future… (see below)

Packt Open Source Content Management System Award
The good people at Packt Publishing contacted us about their Open Source Content Management System Award. The aware “is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) that has been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to the Packt Publishing Website.” This year they’ve included a Best Open Source PHP CMS category. If you like KnowledgeTree and want to nominate it for the award click here.

News from OSCON: An Interesting Week for Open Source Licensing

This week has also been an interesting one for commercial open source: SugarCRM has adopted the GPLv3 for their next major release and the Common Public Attribution License, developed and championed by SocialText’s Ross Mayfield was approved by the OSI. We live in interesting times! We are re-evaluating our licensing approach and so more thoughts on this in a blog post Real Soon Now(tm).