The Philippe Back Report

As you know, I am using a lot of Open Source software.

Be it Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware, Mantis, ProjectPier, Ubuntu, Squeak, Tcl, Perl, LAMP, WordPress, OpenX, R, Octace, Maxima, Gimp, Scribus, Inkscape, OpenOffice…. there are lots of areas where Open Source provides tremendous leverage and ability to customize that is unmatched by commercial offerings once you’ve been through the learning curve and strategic decision. (Check my Oloh badge in the sidebar for more).

I’ve nothing against commercial software. On the contrary, some is really superb and beats the pants of FOSS (in this area, I do use Explorer2, Nusphere PHPEd, GotoMeeting, GotoMyPC, FinalCut Express on Mac, Diskeeper, Sparx Enterprise Architect to name a few). I may run above EUR 10K of proprietary software licences on my laptop – All dutifully paid for).

But FOSS quality varies. And now, there is QSOS.

QSOS is a method, designed to qualify, select and compare free and open source software in an objective, traceable and argued way. It publicly available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Here is an overview:

The assessment goes on like this:

The funny bit is that Atos Origin is involved in this. Atos Origin being one of my customers makes this even more interesting. The world is a small place!

Too bad, Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware isn’t listed. Well, soon enough it will be!

Tiki Suite: Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware + lots of other things in an appliance. You have seen the future:

http://www.lavoixdulibre.info/entrevues/detail-dune-entrevue/emission/tiki-suite/65/liste/2011/

Et une vidéo:
http://info.tiki.org/article156-Tiki-Suite-and-Confoo-ca

Which means that:

“The Tiki Software Community Association has established the Tiki Service Provider program to help match Tiki consultants with users who wish to purchase support. These Tiki Service Providers are active members of the Tiki Community and have agreed to the Tiki Service Provider Code of Conduct. By working with these consultants, clients are helping to grow the Tiki Community.”

I’ve been inside the internals of the thing, helped create sites, or created them altogether. Tiki is for me the best tool for the job when creating community-support sites that have to do with complex access rights, modules, calendars, …

In fact, Tiki allows someone to focus one the real business needs since almost everything is available out of the box. Only the complex requires more intervention.

So, if you need support around here (or everywhere else if you happen to have Skype and/or an IM connection, I am happy to help!

Check this explanation from the community:

Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware has a ton of great features by the way: check them out and call me if you want help on your tiki.