The European Commission is out with a white paper, downloadable as a PDF here, that calls for much broader and more standardized adoption of open source software across Europe. As IDG News Service notes, the white paper is getting both positive and negative reactions because of the bias it shows toward open source software. Jonathan Zuck, President of the Association for Competitive Technology, says in a statement: "It aims to facilitate digital cooperation among European administrations, but in effect it excludes many well-established technologies from being used for e-Government services due to a narrow definition of open standards. This will hurt first and foremost innovative tech start-ups that rely on patent protection to establish themselves in the marketplace." Will it?

My first thought when I saw that OpenText is buying Vignette, one of the oldest providers of content and portal management software, for $310 million, was what a huge player Vignette was as the commercial web ramped up. It was founded in 1995, when all businesses were suddenly forced to build online presences, wrestle with HTML, online collaboration and other new concepts. The number of big businesses that run sites and intranets on Vignette is still long, including Disney, Wachovia, Martha Stewart, Fox NewsDigital, and more. Open source content management solutions have continuously taken business away from proprietary players like Vignette, though, especially as the free and low cost platforms have matured. 

OStatic runs on Drupal, for example, a completely free platform. It works fine for us, and we never need to pay for support or services. As we covered recently in our interview with Alfresco Software Chairman John Newton, Alfresco is doing extremely well with its open source enterprise content management platforms, so we asked the folks there about the meaning of the Vignette acquisition.

Launched in 2005, Alfresco Software provides a leading open source enterprise content management (ECM) system, known for its modularity and scalability. The company was founded by John Newton, co-founder of document management company Documentum, and John Powell, who was the former COO of Business Objects. Alfresco has achieved remarkable growth as a commercial open source firm, has many partners, employs roughly 110 people, and is a member of the Open Source Channel Alliance. John Newton, CTO, Chairman and Co-Founder of Alfresco, was kind enough to take some questions from us on Alfresco's software, its strategy  as a commercial open source company, and the state and future of open source. Here are his thoughts, below the fold.