Rhythm and Business

Norman Kelley's book is entitled "Rhythm and Business" after the Rick James quote, “R&B stands for rhythm and business.” So I'm taking a moment to look at the business side of CMS, especially Plone. One of my measures of effectiveness is the economic health of 3rd party companies.

A quick visit to plone.net shows 225 companies listed in 47 countries. Drupal is covered by Drupal Yellow Pages and it has a nice Google map interface. They have 50 map pins. Searching for "alfresco companies" on the other hand turns up (in the top 30 search results) no unified list of active 3rd party companies. Joomla has a Joomla Yellow Pages with 203 companies identified.

It looks like the number of 3rd party companies doing business around an open-source project is a good proxy for the economic health of that product's business environment. The Plone Foundation should be applauded for their proactive business development on behalf of the Plone community.

In conjunction with this discussion, I should mention another one of Matt Asay's pieces on open source--this one dealing with the Red Hat business model. Its worth a read for anyone working in open source.

And finally, if I still have your attention, here's a chunk pulled right out of a recent posting on Jeff Pott's blog:

Here are the open source projects/companies that made eContent Mag’s eContent 100 this year:

• Alfresco
• Automattic (Wordpress)
• Drupal
• eZ Systems
• JA-SIG
• Liferay
• Plone
• Tiki Wiki
• Typo3

Plone is on the list for the second consecutive year. eContent only produces an alphabetical listing, so the only number we can pull from their data is "number of years listed." More on this in a subsequent write up as I data mine their listings.