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Forrester senior analyst Bob Markham says the customization ability and flexibility are distinct advantages of open source content management systems when compared to closed source alternatives.

Open source content management generally takes two different approaches aimed at two different markets, according to Markham. Web content management (WCM) applications, Markham said, are aimed at the small to medium business market, while frameworks are needed to reach the larger players.

Markham said WCM has not been a hot market, and the open source groups who develop for it have been limited to small uptake. "That may change if vendors are able to aim for outsourcing solutions," Markham said. "In WCM, that makes a lot of sense."

WCM has made a lot of sense for vendors Crown Peak and Atomz, whose proprietary applications have taken the lion's share of the market. However, that share could increasingly go to open source vendors, according to Markham.

With its roots in publishing and entertainment, WCM has been the basis of some off-the-shelf software from medium and larger-sized players, but the real traction for open source in this market has been in Europe, Markham said.

"They have been much more aggressive in pursuing open source solutions than [companies] in North America," Markham said. "Much of it has to do with legislation. They've been more aggressive in saying there's an advantage to open source through legislation.

On the other end of the process from WCM is the framework software used to build custom CMS applications. "The frameworks, which provide the infrastructure to build WCM solutions, are very tunable for large organizations," Markham said. "There is a need to provide custom implementation here," he added, referring to major sites such as Boston.com and AARP.

Despite its advantages, Markham said open source has been held back by licensing issues. Because of the "restrictive" nature of the GPL, which requires making changes and customization public, vendors have moved to the LGPL, which takes a more lenient approach and allows internal changes and customization to be kept internal, according to Markham. "It makes the legal people a little more at ease," he said.

Commercial licenses that are typically variants of the BSD model have also resulted in special contracts between vendors and open source adopters, helping to drive more acceptance, Markham added. "They also provide security and added benefit to open source providers," he said.

Even after open source vendors have overcome the usual issues of apprehension and licensing, they still face the fact that an effective, profitable business model has yet to fully emerge, Markham said. "There isn't a good model to make money at this yet."

The search for a business model is taking shape, however, with the Cocoon open source content management application, which is built from an Apache server base. "Instead of a vendor selling updates and maintenance agreements, the Cocoon community is built out of good developers making specific solutions based on the framework," Markham said. "It has more value-add."

The analyst said similar models, such as that of Plone, are emerging as a result. Plone is an out-of-box-ready content management system built on Zope Application Server. "Plone is a response to where they saw Cocoon was going," Markham said. "It actually makes a lot of sense." Cocoon also now provides Lenya, an incubating Web content management framework based on Cocoon.

The other key factor heretofore missing for open source in content management, Markham said, is the need for a repository for disparate sources and stores of content. Repository software will become an increasingly important part of the overall enterprise content management solution.

Open source companies and groups appear to be realizing this, as evidenced by Computer Associates' (CA) new partnerships with Zope and Plone. Markham said he expects to see more open source projects partnered with proprietary repositories.

"They're basing their repositories on something that has a future, as opposed to something that is customized and may not have a future," he said. "Even though [CA] doesn't have critical mass for its [Ingres] database, [releasing Ingres as open source] is a move to giving confidence that people will be supported in the long term."