Cloud computing will fuel growth in open source software as companies try to manage costs, according to database heavyweight Ingres.

Tom Berquist, former managing director of financial powerhouses Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and now CFO of open source database firm Ingres, made the prediction last week.

Ingres, the second largest open source company, counts the likes of BAE Systems, Cathay Pacific and Lufthansa among its customers.

Berquist said the cloud computing model--of companies' serving applications over the Internet--requires vendors to spend large amounts of cash buying and maintaining servers, telecoms infrastructure and software such as operating systems, Web, application and database servers to support their software as a service (SaaS) operation.

He added because SaaS vendors needed to invest in more hardware and software than traditional software vendors--where applications are sold to customers to install on their own machines--there was a greater drive towards using open source operating systems, Web, application and database servers, as opposed to more expensive commercial alternatives.

Berquist said: "With cloud computing the operating system and the infrastructure is managed and paid for by the vendor rather than by the customer.

"The more we move towards cloud computing, the more that rewards open source because the cloud software vendor can not afford to pay for software for say 25,000 server CPUs.

"They will go towards open source and in many cases self support. People can not afford to spend the money that would be necessary in the old client to server model.

"It can be 10 times cheaper than relying on the commercial guys."

He added that the credit crunch would also fuel adoption of open source software, as it had done during the dot-com crash in the early 2000s.

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Anyone trying to evaluate open source content management systems is aware that there aren't a lot of recent, useful comparative reviews. What's surprising is that this issue is true even for such popular solutions as Drupal and Joomla.

Stating in January that, "most comparisons of Drupal (news, link) and Joomla (news, link) conclude that you should select the one that best suits your needs. However, they give too little guidance about how to do that," Webology eBusiness Solutions set out to quantify the pros and cons of each by releasing a survey.
The Survey

The survey divided questions into five categories:

   1. Developers
   2. Documentation
   3. Performance/Functional Aspects
   4. Appearance
   5. Ease of Use/Learning

Users were classified by their response to "CMS most experienced with," with those answering "Not Applicable/Don't Know" to this question being removed from the analysis.

In general, the respondents were slanted a bit more toward Joomla users than Drupal users. Their roles when working with their respective CMS's break down to the largest group being Project Managers, and other large groups including Programmers and Designers. The Drupal users were, somewhat unsurprisingly, more experienced, with a median of 7 years experience in web development, while Joomla users claimed 5.

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We are often asked the question when we will officially stop supporting Joomla 1.0.x and, given the huge install-base, it's not an easy question to answer. We know that the code originates from several years ago and is certainly showing its age (Mambo 4.5.2 was released in early 2005, but the codebase originates partly from 4.5, released in December 2003). To recap our short history, the Joomla Project originated from a fork of the Mambo Project on August 17, 2005. Shortly thereafter, Joomla 1.0 was released on September 16, 2005 and was an improved version of Mambo 4.5.3 (you can still find that code in subversion). The announcement of the Alpha version of Joomla 1.1 was made on October 27, 2005 and this version was later on renamed Joomla 1.5. What began as a minor update turned out to be a full re-write of the codebase and the current version of Joomla was released on January 22, 2008.

Since then, seven versions of Joomla 1.5 have been released. Download numbers and usage have increased exponentially, evidenced by nearly 7 million downloads. In January 2008, just 15% of newly posted extensions were Joomla 1.5 native and that percentage has recently soared to 73%. The adoption rate of Joomla 1.5, by both users and developers alike, has occured at an amazing rate and demonstrates an untold level of commitment to the Joomla Project on both sides.

But now it's time to say our farewells to our old friend Joomla 1.0. As of July 22, 2009, the Joomla 1.0.x series will no longer be supported. As a user, is it required that you upgrade from Joomla 1.0.x? Absolutely not since security upgrades will be supported until this date. But if you're a user who hasn't yet upgraded to Joomla 1.5, you should do so in order to start reaping the benefits the latest version has to offer. If you're a developer in that small minority who hasn't yet become Joomla 1.5 native, this is your last call to join the majority of developers who have already discovered the power and ease of the Joomla 1.5 series.

In the meantime, we are working diligently on Joomla 1.6 (with its new ACL), which promises to be the most exciting release for Joomla yet.

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