See What’s Out There

At See3, we have been building our capacity to support web projects running on Drupal. Drupal is an open-source content management system with lots of great functionality. One issue that comes up when we talk about Open Source software is a kind of fear of the unknown among people who were taught software by Microsoft.

The Nonprofit Open Source Initiative has just published an updated primer on choosing free and open source software for nonprofits. What do you need to know before choosing to move to Linux or use Drupal or any of the hundreds of popular FOSS products? Michelle Murrain, a great contributor to the NTEN community and the nonprofit tech community generally, has clearly worked hard to bring this out. It’s worth a look. You can see it live here or get a PDF version here.

From the conclusion:

FOSS is, on many levels, a good fit for nonprofits. FOSS can provide less expensive, easier to maintain, more extensible, more secure implementations of software than proprietary alternatives. FOSS development and FOSS communities often work in ways that are consonant with nonprofit mission (in fact, many FOSS projects are nonprofit organizations themselves.) The development of FOSS specifically for the nonprofit sector provides the possibility of freely available community-driven, community-owned software, that can change and grow with organizations as they grow and change.

Free and open source software still, after all these years, provides real promise for the nonprofit sector. Our challenge is to find ways to work together to further and more fully realize that promise.