Open Source vs. Proprietary: Graphics and Video

by Pearlbear on April 7, 2011

There are some very interesting comparisons to make in this realm, and, I’d say first off, that the proprietary tools are in the lead, for sure.

I’ll start with basic graphics – graphic manipulation tools. Of course, on the proprietary side is the ever present and predominant Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. And, honestly, they are very good tools, and considered industry standards.

On the open source side, the projects that stand out are GIMP (a Photoshop replacement) and Inkscape (a vector graphics program – like Illustrator). I’ve used GIMP for many years, and I don’t generally do a whole lot with graphics, but it always serves my needs.  There has been a lot of back and forth about the GIMP user interface. It is very unlike that of Photoshop. So much so, in fact that someone came up with another project called Gimpshop, which re-does the UI to better match Photoshop.

Both GIMP and Inkscape are completely cross-platform, and available for Mac, Windows and Linux. I’ll leave it to the graphics professionals to say for sure, but they are both worth a look if you don’t want to plunk down hundreds of $ for Photoshop and Illustrator, and/or you like to work with open source tools.

The other realm of stuff that I know some about is video. In term of viewing, on the proprietary side are the players that come with the proprietary operating systems. Itunes/Quicktime comes native with MacOS, and Windows Media Player for Windows. One doesn’t have to pay for these, so it’s a bit hard for open source (or other products, even) to compete. Which is perhaps why the other major proprietary video player, Real Player, has had such a hard time catching on for all of these years. I notice now they seem to have added a ton of features (like video conversion from one format to another).

On the open source side, one program you must know about is VLC by VideoLAN. Totally cross-platform (so cross-platform, they have a version for BeOS!) It plays everything. I mean, everything.This means you don’t have to have several video players around to play different formats. I use it constantly – it’s my go-to video player. It has a bunch of other features as well.

In terms of video editing, again, the proprietary programs have somewhat of a leg up on the open source, although a recent entry into the field may well change that (see below). On the “low-end” (for people like me who make videos like this,) there is, like in the video playing arena, iMovie and Windows Movie Maker, made by Apple and Microsoft respectively, for their own platforms. (An aside, a lot has been said about the crapware iMovie has become – it used to be a really good video editor.) There are other proprietary products as well. I’ve used TrakAxPC, which has a free version and a paid version. There are a variety of other low-end video editing options. There are low-end versions of Adobe’s Premier (called Elements) and Apple’s Final Cut (called Final Cut Express.) On the high end (where I’d love to work more), there is Apple’s Final Cut (only available on Apple hardware) and Adobe Premier (cross-platform). There are also quite a number of high-end, Hollywood products, like Avid (a side note, I used Avid a little bit, way back when it was the first and only non-linear video editing platform).

On the open source end, there are some notable entries. Blender is a very popular cross-platform open source 3-D modeling, animation and editing tool. It’s actually pretty amazing what it can do. (There is a study that compares a bunch of 3D tools for professionals, you can see how Blender stacks up.) Another notable entry is Cinelerra, which only runs on Linux. (You can see videos edited with Cinelerra on Vimeo.) A recent entry into the fray, and the one that might make a huge difference, is Lightworks. This is one of the video editors that Hollywood uses that used to be proprietary. It will go open source later in the year, but you can grab it for free right now. Yes, a Hollywood-quality video editor for free, and soon to be open source. It’s Windows only for now, though.

In summary, proprietary software has the popularity edge, mostly. From this non-graphic professional’s perspective, it seems that one would not be left wanting if you went the open source route, however.

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Web Application Frameworks

by Pearlbear on April 6, 2011

If I got a dollar for every time I heard something like: “we’re trying to choose between Ruby on Rails and Drupal for our new website” or “our developer convinced us to do our new website in Ruby on Rails and we can’t update it,” I wouldn’t be rich, but I’d have some money for a very nice meal at an expensive restaurant.

I know a lot of pretty serious geeks read this blog, but I also know some folks who aren’t do too, and I figured it was time to do a quick outline of web application frameworks, and how they differ from things like a CMS.

A web server, in the physical sense of the phrase, is a box sitting in a data center (or under someone’s desk) with a unique IP address, that answers queries from the internet and serves up data, depending on the request. In the software sense of the phrase, it is the actual piece of software (most often Apache, but sometimes something different.) That software runs in the background, and and listens to requests, then serves up the data.  That data is in some form of HTML, CSS and Javascript, because that is what browsers understand. However, how that HTML, CSS and JS is generated varies depending on the system underneath.

In the old days (when I was starting with web programming, back in the early-mid-90s) it was all HTML flat files (and not even much in the way of CSS or JS at the time.) And dynamic elements were less common (you remember those days.) Now, a minority of web servers actually serve HTML files – they serve HTML, CSS and Javascript dynamically generated by software, like, in the case of this page you are reading now, WordPress.

WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are CMS systems that are written in PHP. PHP is one of many programming languages. Plone, for instance is written in Python. This isn’t really the place to describe what programming languages are, or how they work, but Wikipedia (as always) as a nice entry, worth a read. CMS systems are full-featured – they require no programming to install or configure or get going, or to create a usable interface. They may require some to customize in particular kinds of ways, but I’d say most nonprofit websites don’t need to do that. Most Drupal developers, for instance, don’t spend a whole lot of their time in code unless they work on contributed modules (or contribute patches and such to core.)

A web application framework is one that does require programming to provide the basics of a user interface. The cool thing about frameworks for developers is that it provides a great leg up, and a way to use the model-view-controller design pattern really easily – it’s a powerful way to do development. The advantage of a framework is that it allows you to do great custom apps a lot easier and quicker than before (many web 2.0 apps are written using these frameworks). The disadvantage to a framework is that it does take significant programming to get user interfaces (especially on the admin side) working well. So to use them to build a CMS (or a CRM, for that matter) is probably not a great idea, given the plethora of already-cooked options in the world. People who are working with frameworks are spending much of their time dealing with code.

Popular web application frameworks include Ruby on Rails (using the Ruby programming language,) CakePHP (using PHP), and django (using Python.) Ruby on Rails is arguably the most popular MVC web framework at the moment, but there are a lot of folks using the others. The PHP frameworks (which include Cake, as well as Symfony and Zend) are pretty popular because of the plethora of PHP programmers out there. All of these frameworks get more sophisticated every year, and they are interesting to watch.

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Open Source vs. Proprietary: CMS

by Pearlbear on April 4, 2011

Content Management Systems are an essential part of the communications function of nonprofit organizations. There are a myriad of options, open source options are among the most popular, possibly the most popular.

I’m going to focus here on the nonprofit sector, and options that are most common among nonprofits.

On the proprietary side, there are a number of options, and they fall into three categories:

  1. Single-source proprietary custom CMS (from one web shop, or web host)
  2. Proprietary CMS as part of a large package (such as from Convio or Blackbaud)
  3. Proprietary stand-alone CMS (such as Sharepoint.)

You already know what I think about option 1, so I won’t belabor it here. Many people have found that option 2, using a large package, which includes donation pages, event management, etc. can be a really good option, and I certainly don’t want to say that this is not a good idea – I think it can be – but it also can be quite costly – and for many organizations, it’s overkill. And there are open source options that can do much of the same work for much less money.

There are not a lot of stand-alone proprietary CMS systems in nonprofits these days. Microsoft Sharepoint might be the most common I’ve heard of. Ektron is another one that I’ve heard folks talk about, as well as ExpressionEngine. The advantage of using Sharepoint for Microsoft-centric shops is that there is full integration with lots of internal network resources.

The open source options are many, but the big four: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone, stand out from the pack. As you know, I am pretty loyal to Drupal (and secondarily, WordPress) but I have to say that Joomla and Plone are solid, wonderful projects, with great communities, and active development, and will serve you well. Check out Idealware’s newish comparison of the four – it can help you figure out what’s best based on your needs.

Other open source options that I think are worth looking at include: Alfresco, which is heavy on the document management functionality and DotNetNuke, which is based on .NET, and somewhat popular among Windows users. Two up and comers I am very interested in following include Radiant and Refinery, both based on Ruby on Rails. There is also Django-CMS, written on top of the django framework (a python framework.)

If you’re really interested in open source CMS options, and looking not for data on features, but for data on popularity, marketing, community and such (a good idea if you are, for instance, a shop deciding what CMS systems to develop with and support) check out this report from Water and Stone (a digital marketing agency.)

I think on the whole, though, the number and richness of options on the open source side is quite a bit better than that on the proprietary side, and until I get an answer to this question, I can only guess that open source options have won over proprietary ones in the nonprofit sector.

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Interesting Sites I’m looking at

by Michelle Murrain on April 3, 2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Drupalcon Highlight Reel

by Pearlbear on March 31, 2011

I didn’t make it to Drupalcon Chicago, but, thanks to the organizers of the conference, it doesn’t mean I need to miss the sessions. I’ve been looking through videos both the regular sessions, as well as the ignite sessions (thanks, @gregoryheller), and here are my highlight presentations (this does reflect what I’m interested in more than it reflects what’s the best of DrupalCon):

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Drupal/Salesforce Integration

by Pearlbear on March 23, 2011

A bit over a year ago, I wrote a post about the status of Drupal/Salesforce Integration. I figured it was time to do an update.

At the moment, if you want to integrate Drupal and Salesforce, you have three options:

  1. Use the contributed modules (or have a developer install and configure them for you).
  2. Use Jackson River’s Springboard.
  3. Roll your own (or have a developer roll your own for you.)

I’m going to talk in much detail about #1 in a bit. I’ve not had any experience with Springboard, but it’s important to understand that it is not open source, and is only maintained by one shop. That is going to be an inherent weakness – no matter what. I don’t know enough about it to match it to the contributed modules, but it’s hard to imagine that it’s possible for it to keep up, given the nature of open source development. All of that said, it’s supposed to be an interesting all-in-one sort of option, so it’s probably worth a look.

Rolling your own is always a precarious proposition. I frankly can’t imagine much of a situation where  it would be preferable to modifying what’s available and contributing the mods back.

So what is the status of the Drupal modules? Right now, there is an alpha release for Drupal 6, which is alpha in that very humble open source sense – it’s being used in quite a number of production sites. It includes some great stuff. You can see an overview here, in the slide deck for a talk given at NTC last week, which compares the integration of Salesforce with 3 of the big open source CMS platforms, Plone, Drupal, and Joomla.

There are four major projects:

  • Salesforce Suite, which includes:
    • The API – the core module that does the communicating with the Salesforce API
    • Contrib – a module that provides support for import/export from contributed modules
    • Export Queue (experimental) for queuing exports
    • Import – importing data from SF
    • Match – for matching objects before creating new ones
    • Node – for linking Drupal nodes to SF objects
    • Notifications (experimental, sort of – it’s worked quite well for me) – allowing Drupal to handle SF outbound messages
    • User – matching users to SF objects
  • Salesforce/Ubercart – provides integration for Ubercart. Uses the Salesforce Suite API
  • Salesforce Feeds – allows for feeding SF records into Drupal via Feeds. Also uses the Salesforce Suite API
  • Salesforce Webform – Allows for passing data from a Drupal Webform to Salesforce. Currently does not use the Salesforce Suite API, and cannot be used on the same site as the Salesforce Suite, but hopefully that will change soon.

All of these modules are actively maintained, there is an active base of folks using and contributing (including me) and there are plans afoot for Drupal 7, with big improvements. Of course, there are still some snaggy spots, and it helps if you know some about Salesforce to have this work really well, but I’ve gotten good results doing two-way sync of user and node data with the Salesforce Suite, as well as used the Salesforce Feeds module some.

If you use Salesforce, want integration, and are pondering a CMS choice, definitely check out the overview slides. If you are using Drupal, want integration, and considering a CRM, definitely consider Salesforce. And if you are already using both, and looking to find ways to integrate them, drop me a line, I can either directly help you, or point you in the direction of folks who can.

 

 

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Open Source vs. Proprietary: Nonprofit CRM

by Pearlbear on March 16, 2011

CRM systems (which I am defining rather loosely, rather than tightly, for the purpose of this post – as the tool or set of tools used to track constituents, donations, perhaps even events and volunteers) are arguably the most important technology tools that nonprofits use. Organizations use this tool to track donors, send out newsletters, track the success of campaigns, track who is engaged with the organization in what ways, etc.

And, in my experience over the past 15 years, it’s where organizations are willing to spend the most money on technology – often more than on their website or other technology tools – for good reason. Because of this, the deck has always been stacked against open source tools in this arena. The sheer number of vendors providing this toolset for nonprofits is huge (although rapidly shrinking.) Two of them (Convio and Blackbaud) are even publicly traded companies, which says a lot about the profit potential of this vertical.

On the proprietary side, there is a wide range of available tools, from the relatively inexpensive, like Salesforce (web-based, including Convio Common Ground and the Nonprofit Starter Pack,) eTapestry (web-based, now owned by Blackbaud), Democracy in Action, and GiftWorks (desktop) to the egregiously expensive (you know which ones I mean.) Both NTEN and Idealware are the best sources for information about the range of options for this toolset – that’s out of scope for this post.

As you can tell, I’ve lumped SaaS tools like Salesforce, DIA and eTapestry in with proprietary in this post – that’s because that’s what they are – proprietary. However, Salesforce in particular has a leg up that most other proprietary tools don’t have, because of their open APIs and their incredibly robust development platform. That combination is impossible to beat if you need integration, ease of data movement, and a lot of customization. From my perspective, open data (via open APIs) can sometimes be more important to consider than whether or not a tool is open source – since integration with other tools, as well as using external tools of various sorts is critical. Closed data systems, difficult to integrate systems, or systems that require payment to get access to your data should be avoided at all cost.

On the open source side, there are a number options: you can choose an open source CRM package (designed for business), like SugarCRM, and use it or customize it for use in a nonprofit, use CiviCRM, or choose the desktop-based nonprofit CRM called MPX (built by a company called Orange Leap.) I’m excited about a new Drupal project called “Red Hen CRM” but it’s very fledgeling.

CiviCRM is a web-based open source nonprofit-focused CRM/Donation management tool. It’s been around for a while now, and is used by many organizations, some quite large (like the Wikimedia Foundation.) It is quite broad in its feature set – it has donation pages, event management, e-newsletter functionality, even a case-management system. I’ve installed, configured and administered CiviCRM many times, still work with it, and I have, like most developers, a love/hate relationship with it:

  • I love that it’s open source/free software
  • It’s got a great community of developers and users
  • I love that it’s feature rich – you cannot find the whole set of things it does in any proprietary tool that I’ve seen.
  • It is a tool that has unmatched cost-effectiveness for small organizations
  • It’s great that it integrates with both Drupal and Joomla (although the Drupal integration is by far the most solid – and it is a very nice integration – hard to get with proprietary tools.)
  • It is relatively easy to set up for most functionality

But …

  • Data migration into CiviCRM is often nightmarish (this is really where the hate lies)
  • Reporting tools are improving, but don’t match the proprietary versions
  • It can sometimes be pretty tough to handle complex issues
  • It can be tough to troubleshoot issues

MPX is a desktop tool, and although it is open source (GPLv3,) unlike CiviCRM, or SugarCRM, it is built on top of a proprietary stack (.Net/MS SQL Server.) It has primarily been used in faith-based organizations (that is Orange Leap’s primary client base.) But it’s a very full featured product, and quite mature.

So if you are a small organization that perhaps is still working with spreadsheets, CiviCRM is a great idea to check out. But in general, there are a lot choices and, sadly, few of them are open source.

 

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Alternatives to MySQL

by Pearlbear on March 14, 2011

For those of us that depend on MySQL everyday, the buyout of Sun (which had bought MySQL) by Oracle did not bode well. A decidedly biased survey by the folks behind PostgreSQL suggests that many people worry about the health of MySQL in Oracle’s hands. I’ve mentioned this before, and I do think the conventional wisdom is that open source software (which includes OpenOffice.org, MySQL and Java) will not flourish at Oracle. It makes sense – Oracle has never had a culture of fostering open source software, and it seems unlikely to obtain one.

So what does someone do who builds their houses right on top of the LAMP stack (M standing for MySQL)?

For most folks, especially if they build on shared hosting infrastructures, this just isn’t an issue. They depend upon their hosting providers, for whom it may or may not be an issue – but they won’t have to think about it. For those folks in a position to choose which database software to use, (for example, you use VPS systems like Amazon, Slicehost, Linode, etc.,) then I think there are two pretty good options:

  • Go with MariaDB, which is basically a drop-in replacement for MySQL (and conveniently starts with an “M”.)
  • Switch to PostgreSQL.

MariaDB is a branch of MySQL that came about because of the uncertainty relating to Oracle’s ownership of MySQL. From the website:

In most respects MariaDB will work exactly as MySQL: all commands, interfaces, libraries and APIs that exist in MySQL also exist in MariaDB. There is no need to convert databases to switch to MariaDB. MariaDB is a true drop in replacement of MySQL! Additionally, MariaDB has a lot of nice new featuresthat you can take advantage of.

The problem is that the major Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat) don’t yet have MariaDB in their repositories, so it will be a while before MariaDB is an easy apt-get or yum away from installation (there are some independent repositories and builds.)

PostgreSQL is a different beast entirely. It’s been an also-ran in the open source database race, and I was, for many years, quite faithful to it. It’s a very solid database, and it was ACID compliant before MySQL was. It’s major weakness (and why the LAMP stack is called that and not the LAPP stack) was that it was a fair bit slower than MySQL. But  that weakness has long been taken care of, but the damage was already done.

Many open source web database systems can use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL at this point. But PostgreSQL doesn’t have the same large user base, and doesn’t have many of the same web-based and desktop tools that MySQL does. There are differences in the SQL commands and such, and the command-line interface looks different. There is also a big difference in how Auto-numbered fields get handled, but that’s not really an issue that folks who don’t dive into deep database and code need to deal with.

So which to go with? It probably makes sense to wait a bit, first for MariaDB to make it into mainstream repositories, etc., and also to see what the fate of MySQL is. And checking out PostgreSQL is always a good option, it’s a very good database system, and the likely flight from MySQL might do the project some good.

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Open Source vs. Proprietary: Browsers

by Pearlbear on March 14, 2011

The browser wars between proprietary and open source browsers have changed in some ways from the days that it was simply Internet Explorer vs. Netscape. There are more players on both sides of the field, with some interesting complexities.

On the proprietary side, still, sits Internet Explorer, now about ready to pop with version 9. It definitely depends on who is gathering the data, but IE has about 44% of the market. This is down significantly from its high point, back in the dark ages of 2005, when it garnered over 90%. It has been dropping steadily since. This drop has been primarily, but not exclusively due to the open source browser, Firefox. More recently, however, two other proprietary browsers, Opera and Safari, have been increasing their own market shares. Now, Opera gets about 2% of the market (up from microscopic some years ago.) Safari, used mainly by Apple Mac users (although there is a Windows version) now gets about 5% of the market.

On the open source side, Firefox is certainly the leader, with a bit less than 30% of the market. Chrome, which is sort of an open source browser, is now getting around 14% of the market. So what do I mean when I say Chrome is “sort of an open source browser”?  Chromium, is the open source project which results in the browser Chrome – but there are a bunch of additions Google makes to Chrome which are proprietary, and not in the Chromium codebase.

So, anyway, basically, between Firefox and Chrome, the open source side is a smidge in the lead over the proprietary side, but it’s pretty close to even. And still, the primary reason for the difference is that IE still ships with Windows (and Safari with Mac OS X), and if people don’t take the step to download and install another browser if they are a windows user, they will still just be using IE.

In the mobile space, things are very interesting. Opera mobile is in the lead, with about 21%, followed by iPhone, Nokia, and Blackberry. These are all proprietary. Bringing up the rear is Android, at 16%. But I’m sure that is going to change as Android begins to gobble up the moble smartphone market share.

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Take this short survey

by Pearlbear on March 13, 2011

Take the Ada Initiative Census The Ada Initiative is a nonprofit organization that works to support women in open culture (open source software, open standards, open content, etc.)  Really great stuff. They have a new census that they are encouraging people to take. So please take it, and spread the word.

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