I had the pleasure of having lunch with Rob Page and Thomas Morling of Digital Creations yesterday; Rob is the creator of Zope, probably the leading open source Web content management project. Zope is finding new and suprising applications at some large organizations, not the least of which is NATO, which uses it somehow for command and control functions. Interestingly, NATO didn't tell Digital Creations that they would be implementing a Zope system; they just went to the Zope site and downloaded it.

Among a few topics we did chat about the problems large content management vendors will face in the next few years. Most have revenue models based on a 50/50 split between product sales and service fees. Licensing fees are substantial, and the products of large vendors such as Interwoven and Vignette are too expensive for small organizations. And these products are for the most part development platforms underneath a CMS framework, so too often institutions are disappointed with what they purchased and with the amount of work that needs to be done in order for a system to function.

Enter Zope, and other open source CMS platforms such as OpenCMS, Ars Digita, and Open ACS. The platforms and framework are free, and the only cost is labour. While it is more attractive than a closed source model, there are some questions: Is creating and developing an open source platform a sustainable business model? And will open CMS projects be able to compete in terms of functionalities with commercial products?

Only time will tell.