[Osia-members] Australian Gov Drupal

[Daniel J Jitnah]

Perhaps I should have referenced the actual home page in the first place

agov.com.au

instead of the about page

agov.com.au/about


On 30/09/14 14:11, Bob Birchall wrote:
> The key to understanding this seems to be the last sentence on this
> page:  http://agov.com.au/about
>
> My impression is that this is a commercial provider getting into a
> specific market with a product based on an open source project. 
> Others are free to get out there with competing offers.  Ensuring
> software is readily upgradable and there is no vendor lock-in might be
> attributes of a competing product someone may design.

Indeed, nothing stopping a Wordpress or Joomla or CMS-X provider
proposing a similar solution based on the specs available from agov. Or
even fork Drupal to propose a completely new solution.

Furthermore, to assume that all cms are freely interchangeable between
each other is likely not reasonable.  It may well be that the Drupal
solution was considered to be the one best meeting the Au.Gov
requirements at this point in time at least.

On the question of one choice of Drupal, compared to a one choice of
Microsoft option, the "one choice situation" for Microsoft also imposed
technological constraint, being a closed platform. If you were stuck on
a Sharepoint platform migrating to a different platform would be tough
option.  But on a Drupal platform its more feasible for example for one
to write code to for example migrate to CMS-X.

It has to be acknowledge that we do have a very different scenery now
where the potential for other choices (of CMS) to be considered by the
AuGov is now more open.  I would not describe the situation now as being
a lock in to Drupal in the same way as it was a lock in to Microsoft. 
Such an assertion ignores the fundamental characteristics of Open Source
v/s Closed source software.  If we allow these to play out in the longer
term, we should end up with a very different situation.


Cheers
Daniel.
>
> In the end, the ultimate test is customer satisfaction.
>
> Bob Birchall
> /CALYX//
> /
> On 30/09/14 13:07, Aimee Maree wrote:
>> It concerns me to think that the government would standardise on a distribution of Drupal... as a CMS aficionado it concerns me that one solution would be chosen and other open source CMS which might be a lot better then other matches are not looked into. Also the concern is updates because it is a proprietary flavour of Drupal it means upgrades like Drupal8 etc will be dependent upon previous next getting the distro and custom modules upgraded etc... We fought for years to get Open Source as an acceptable choice and looked at in tenders and now it seems this objective has gone too far the other way aka removing choice and selection again.
>>
>>
>>> On 30 Sep 2014, at 1:02 pm, Daniel J Jitnah <djitnah at greenwareit.com.au> wrote:
>>>
>>> Might be of interest to many who have not seen it before!
>>>
>>>
>>> http://agov.com.au/about
>>>
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> Daniel.
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