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.