What's more, because its open source you can build exactly want you want from scratch or use one of the great distributions, like Commons or Open Atrium. Acquia's Commons 2.0 Beta 1 has just been released, with new Status Wall functionality (see the preview video above).

FULLY REVISED IN DECEMBER 2010!  We've taken our popular 2009 report comparing four free and open source systems -- WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Plone -- that can help you to build and manage a website, and completely updated it to the newest versions of the systems. We provide both a feature summary and detailed reviews, as well as a directory of consultants. 

Which are easiest to use? Which provide the most flexibility in setting up your website? Which provide the strongest features for website community features, workflow, or ease of maintenance? This 82-page report answers these questions and many, many more!

Idealware, is a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits to make smart software decisions. This is an updated version of their 2009 report and is well worth a read - and not just for non-profits, but anyone thinking of using an open source WCMS.

What is Handshake?

Handshake is a business networking prototype run by the MITRE Corporation, created to support valuable relationships between current employees, industry, vendors, academia, sponsors, former employees, and other FFRDCs. Handshake helps MITRE bring the best talent to bear on sponsor problems of critical national importance.

Along with some of our other preferred social computing platforms, we've also done a fair bit of work with Elgg at Headshift in the last few years. But I'm particularly pleased to see Elgg gaining increasing recognition. From a software architecture perspective its quite unique and won't suit every situation, but it does deserve to be counted as an open source option that has great potential for enterprise application.

The Internet, September 28, 2010 - The community of volunteers who develop and promote OpenOffice.org, the leading free office software, announce a major change in the project’s structure. After ten years’ successful growth with Sun Microsystems as founding and principal sponsor, the project launches an independent foundation called "The Document Foundation", to fulfil the promise of independence written in the original charter.

The Foundation will be the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals and organisations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a truly free office suite. It will generate increased competition and choice for the benefit of  customers and drive innovation in the office suite market. From now on, the OpenOffice.org community will be known as "The Document Foundation".

Oracle, who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of the new Foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten years. Pending this decision, the brand "LibreOffice" has been chosen for the software going forward.

Personally I've been using OpenOffice a lot more recently on my Mac, although iWork is my main workhorse. However, I've had it installed on various machine over the last few years and found it has been getting better and better.

But if you don't use OpenOffice you might be thinking, so what? Should you care about the future of OpenOffice? I think there are a couple of reasons:

• OpenOffice might be part of the back end of another product you use; and
• If you care about the adoption and use of The Open Document Format (ODF).

Like many others, I hope Oracle does the right thing here and hands over the OpenOffice brand.

You might have heard of Ushahidi - the open source crisis software, used to map and visualise information as it is happening - but have you heard of their other project, SwiftRiver?

"SwiftRiver is a free and open source platform that helps people make sense of a lot of information in a short amount of time. The SwiftRiver platform was born out of the need to understand and act upon a wave of massive amounts of crisis data that tends to overwhelm in the first 24 hours of a disaster. Since then, there has been a great deal of interest in this tool for other industries, such as news rooms and brand monitoring groups.
In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels such as Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds. This free tool is especially useful for organizations who need to sort their data by authority and accuracy, as opposed to popularity. These organizations include the media, emergency response groups, election monitors and more. This might include journalists and other media institutions, emergency response groups, election monitors and more."

The goals of the components in the Swiftriver platform are to:

• To speed up the process of managing real-time data streams (email, web, sms, twitter)
• To add elusive context (location, historical data) and history (reputation of sources) to online research
• To offer a dashboard for monitoring multiple channels of information at once
• To offer advanced aggregation and analytic tools on or offline
• To give the user control over advance curation tools and filter

Just like Ushahidi has possible applications outside of humanitarian crisis situations, looking at that list above its pretty obvious that SwiftRiver could also have many useful applications in any situation where you are trying to manage a stream of social media information. Premium access is apparently coming soon. See the swiftly.org site for more information.

Something to investigate over the summer break, NoSQL:

Next Generation Databases mostly address some of the points: being non-relational, distributed, open-source and horizontal scalable. The movement began early 2009 and is growing rapidly. Often more characteristics apply as: schema-free, replication support, easy API, eventually consistency, and more. So the misleading term "nosql" (some call it "not only sql") should be seen as an alias to something like the definition above.

I'm particularly interested in the schema-free variety of NoSQL databases, like the Apache CouchDB project. However, this is just one variety of NoSQL.

Hat tip to Redmonk.

OPEN source software offers one cure for clinical system implementation woes, as authorities struggle to find solutions that meet all medical requirements, a leading health informatics researcher says.

...

Rather than the all-in, big-bang approach of a full CIS (clinical information system) implementation, an open, standards-based approach would allow a more incremental, lower risk approach, with organic expansion based on lessons learnt.

I think the mixing of terminology around open source software and open standards is a little confusing in the piece. However, what is clear is that complex environments, like we find in health care, need new approaches to information technology to avoid the mistakes of the past. This includes open source software, open standards, etc but also new approaches to procurement, support, solution design and project management. Just focusing on open source software itself is missing the bigger picture of the challenge. And what about the hardware too?

Of course, it's easy to imagine that the use of open source software will slash the government's IT budget. After all, this software is freely downloadable. I have a feeling it's quite a bit more complicated than that.

First off, government has a huge number of special requirements (remember the flap over President Obama's blackberry?) Second, don't underestimate the difficulty of doing business in Washington. Procurement is done through a complex ballet understood by few open source companies. Third, a big IT deployment like this requires coordination between many companies, each providing a piece of the puzzle. According to techpresident.com, no fewer than five firms were involved in the switch: prime contractor General Dynamics Information Systems, Drupal specialists Phase 2 and Acquia, hosting provider Terremark, and CDN-supplier Akamai. (Disclosure: O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures is an investor in Acquia.)

The special nature of the government marketplace is one of the reasons why I launched the Gov 2.0 Expo, which will be held in Washington DC next May. There are huge opportunities for open source, web 2.0, and new media companies in government, but there are also challenges reaching that market. One of my goals for the event is to increase the visibility of cutting edge technology firms not just to government agencies, but also to the prime contractors who are putting together these complex procurements.

The net-net is that I suspect that simply using open source software won't slash government IT budgets, at least not right away. What it will do is increase the amount of value we get for our money and the speed with which new technology can be adopted. Features that would have cost millions of dollars and years of development to add will now be rolled into the scope of current contracts.

It's also important to realize that using open source is very different from contributing to open source. Despite the exaggerated claims in the AP story, that "the programming language is written in public view, available for public use and able for people to edit", the White House has not yet released any of the modifications they made to Drupal or its operating environment back to the open source community. The source code for Drupal (and the rest of the LAMP stack) is indeed available, but the modifications that were made to meet government security, scalability, and hosting requirements have not yet been shared. In my conversations with the new media team at the White House, it is clear that they are exploring this option.

Giving modifications back to the Drupal community is the next breakthrough announcement that I'll be looking for.

Personally I think there is way too much emphasis on 'free as in beer' when it comes to stories about governments using open source. Glad to see Tim O'Reilly bringing some reality back to the conversation.

You might have heard me talking before about Google's SideWiki and I said:

"wouldn't this kind of functionality be great on an intranet? It would be one way of upgading legacy apps with some social capabilities?"

Well, Scrumptious could well be it. And perhaps even more elegantly, it is based on solid RESTful principles and uses the open source TiddlyWeb server as a backend (TiddlyWeb is the back end for TiddlyWiki), which offers a range of potiential benefits in terms of this being an inhouse version of SideWiki - e.g. browsable, searchable, mashable and 'securable'. I really hope Scrumptious continues to be developed.

Michael Mahemoff (Scrumptious' creator) also pointed me to this list of del.icio.us, digg clones and Open Source Social Bookmarking Engines.

Hat tip to the comments on Mark Morrell's blog.