David Smeringe weblog

Stuck in work process I launched Thunderbird to skim through the TYPO3 newslists. Apparently I haven’t checked that one for some time since Thunderbird suggested me to get the latest 500 posts Anyway. There was a really funny, or should I say sad, posting about a Russian rebrand/fork of TYPO3. First he uses a pseudonym posting news about a fork, then he denies ‘borrowing’ TYPO3 code and icons, finaly changing into admiting having to change a few lines of code and some icons.. doh.. – check out the site and judge for yourself.

It’s really sad that people just can’t see the fundamental philosophy of TYPO3 and the intentions of it’s original inventor Kasper Skårhöj, releasing his work as GPL:d open source software – Inspire people to share!

I few days earlier I stumbled upon a swedish fork/overlay work of TYPO3 called TYPO3 magenta. I got the similar feelings over this one as with that Russian guys fork. Though this is a bit more balancing on the edge. The TYPO3 name is still there but with a suffix. It’s open stated to be built on TYPO3. From the website (freely translated from Swedish using google..):

“TYPO3 Magenta is a web-based system to manage, organize and publish content on websites. TYPO3 Magenta is a further development of the publishing tool TYPO3. TYPO3 is based on open source which means significantly lower costs compared with commercial counterparts. TYPO3 Magenta has developed with the user in focus. The primary user group is Swedish small-and medium-sized enterprises.”

It’s sold in a license form with system, hosting and support.

But as I said, I find this solution better – while not good. I’m guessing it’s mostly about a nifty back end skinn. Refactoring TYPO3 this way is like saying “TYPO3 is good but old school. We make it modern and better with our own version”. And the main issue is still – what would a company loose going 100% TYPO3 and sharing improvements rather then trying to be so special?

I will be honest. We started our business with two CMS solutions. CMS made simple and TYPO3. One simple CMS for the simple sites and one advanced for the larger ones. We promoted them as simple and advanced cms. However during time I realized that both we and the solutions themselves would benefit much more exposing TYPO3 as it is, with it’s huge community and existing brand name rather then trying to make it seem more like our own, and so far it’s just been true. I think that the more credibility and reward the community gets for it’s efforts the better TYPO3 will be.

After all, the community is a vital part of TYPO3 together with it’s open source base. Alongside with that TYPO3 is also a very strong brand and should be promoted and empowered so.

Inspire people to share! – it will get us so much further

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 07:30 and is filed under Development, Typo3, web life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.