CU Blogs

 We have a few stats plugins on cublogs.org now, one of which being the new FireStats.  FireStats has released a beta of their next version which includes support for WordPressMu.  Simply click on plugins and then activate FireStats.  This can work in unison with Google Analytics as well and provides an excellent option for analytics embedded inside of the management console for your blog.

In an article on TechCrunch today, the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, took some harsh words about the grey line that exists in the open source community: how to make money from it.

After BarCampBankSeattle, a small group of us have continued the discussion surrounding the core processing marketplace and opportunities that exist within that space.  Primarily, if an open source core processor will work.

Some CU’s love the idea of open source; a community based development of software that is technically free to the end users, although it is not with cost.  Other CU’s shy away from open source because they would much rather have a turn-key solution in which the vendor provides all of the servicing for the particular product and is on the contractual hook as well.

While some CU’s accept OSS (Open Source Software) and everything that comes along with it, would those same CU’s accept an open sourced core or any other software related to their core, online banking for example?  As this Coding Horror article talks about, many open source product have scaling issues associated with them and the article uses Twitter and RoR (Ruby on Rails) as the example.

Assuming that CU’s could/would accept a major open source operating component (core, online banking, debit/credit cards, payroll processing, etc), how would the company providing the software keep the lights on and servers running?  In the TechCrunch article, WordPress takes some flak for no longer allowing sponsored themes, or themes with text ad links embedded in them, in their theme directory, yet sells an anti-spam plugin to commercial and other non-personal users.  One could go the MySQL/Red Hat/Sugar route and offer "Enterprise" versions of the software for a price while open sourcing the basic version. 

Could a core provider offer a basic version for free but also offer an "Enterprise" version to clients willing to pay?  Would CU’s even buy a core processor that is open sourced?  How do you address the perceived security concerns associated with open source?  As someone point out to me, the ratio of hacker-to-contributor would be much higher for an open source core than FireFox or OpenOffice for example.  If you create a nasty FireFox plugin that reboots someone’s computer, woo-hoo, but if you could go download the core software that a bank or credit union is running, where would you spend your time?