OStatic

In a recent post titled Does Open Source Need Better Evangelists? I noted that many open source project leaders neglect to promote and market their offerings as effectively as proprietary software purveyors do. Of course, ask most skilled marketers behind successful proprietary software products how important it is to have a 21st century, good looking, informative web site, and they'll say that it's plenty important. That's why it's good to see both the Drupal.com and Mozilla.org sites getting their dowdy home pages and sites ready for makeovers. Here's what some of the proposed makeovers look like.

Dana Blankenhorn at ZDNet has an interesting piece up called The big question really facing newspapers. As many newspapers are moving to online-only presences, because of a severe print advertising market, publishers and editors are having to rethink the whole newspaper business model. Blankenhorn suggests that many papers would be wise to consider open source content management systems for their online efforts. He specifically cites Drupal, which OStatic is based on, and Acquia, which provides a commercially supported version of Drupal. Here's why open source content management makes a lot of sense for the papers, and other publishers.

Acquia, which offers a commercially supported version of the open source Drupal content management system is out with a series of announcements today. The company has a new CEO, Tom Erickson, who was formerly CEO of Systinet, which he sold to Mercury Interactive. Acquia has also announced a public beta of Acquia Search, a hosted service, as well as cloud-based Drupal hosting, and Drupal stack installers for Windows and the Mac.

One of the big topics to be discussed at the upcoming Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), ?March 24th and 25th at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, will be the future of open source. In preparation, OStatic is running a series of guest posts on this theme, featuring thought leaders from top open source projects. Last week, we checked in with Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal content management system, and co-founder of Acquia. This week, Martin Schneider, director of product marketing for SugarCRM, weighs in on the open cloud, and how SaaS, open source and dynamic platforms are converging. Here are his thoughts.