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How about a Freeware Solution?
 
Numerous DMS, CMS and ILM products compete for the favour of the customers. Only rarely is taken into consideration also to look for open source and freeware products. Mostly, the argument of the hesitant users states as follows: further development, professiency and rights are not sufficiently preserved. This, however, does not hinder open source products to further spread. In the end, it is desisive how big the community attending an open source product is.
In the Web content management environment, however, with Typo 3 a high standard alternative has already emerged, which even finds its way to the data centres of large-scale enterprises. Meanwhile the number of free WCM products has considerably grown. But what about the product environment concerning solutions which do not only deal with WCM but are also suitable for large-scale and shared applications? Here, solutions like Fedora or dSpace can be named for example.
The Fedora Project
Let's take Fedora as an example. At this, Fedora does not refer to the open source Linux version in connection with RedHat (Fedora Core 2 has lately been released consilidating the Fedora Group with RedHat) but to the CMS repository system of the same name – called Fedora Project (www.fedora.info). Fedora is an acronym coined from federated digital object repository architecture. Fedora is a repository system combining elements of Web content management, electronic publishing, digital library management, records management, digital asset management, document management and archiving.
The most important qualities are: the extensible object model, the support of standards like Dublin Core, the integrated use of XML, object sharing and the corresponding flexible scalability, version management, support of OAI-PMH, a Web interface and an extensive API.
Fedora is open source software and is licenced under the Mozilla Public Licence. Though, the main target group currently are libraries, the implementation for publishers and archives becomes increasingly attractive. Its development already started in 1997 and was supported by several organisations. The first version was implemented in the digital library of the University of Virginia in 1999. Since 2002 Fedora has been open source.
Particularly, donation money from the Mellon Foundation made it possible to realise a distributable product.
Fedora uses a very consequent object approach: information objects are defined by a persistent, unique identifier (PUID), metadata for the use control, system-internal metadata and user-defined content components. XML repositories and relational data bases are used in combination to manage the content. Different storage subsystems can be used for the content. Fedora itself is a 100 percent Java-programmed solution (Sun Java J2SDK1.4) and with its Web API it supports most of the common Web portals via http and Soap. It is executable under Microsoft Windows 2000, NT and XP as well as under Solaris and Linux. Though, American universities are currently the main users the international interest is increasing.
Is open source also the more suitable concept for long-term archiving?
Fedora is just one example for freeware. Particularly, in the field of long-term archiving (preservation) several products are available. Asked about the reason the initiators in this product environment mostly reply that "the vendors of commercial long-term archiving systems do not consider the special requirements of genuine long-term archiving but are only interested in short-term product sales and that is why we have to do it ourselves". Above all with the topic of long-term archiving for decades and centuries open source solutions frequently are, among a community of shared interest, an alternative to the standard products of the current vendors. Thus, again back to the sales counter: How about a freeware solution? (Kff)
01/2007, Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer
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