Feature: Share & Share Alike

The open-source movement has come a long way from its homebrew days, and newspapers are becoming active participants

By Mark Toner | Illustration by Leo Acadia

First Published: February 2008

Free speech and free beer? Newspapers obviously care a great deal about the former—and many of the folks who work at them probably wouldn't mind a bit of the latter. They're also the bywords of the open-source movement. Software, this idealistic and vocal community of developers fervently believes, should not only be free (like beer) but also give its users the fundamental right (like speech) to freely adapt it to meet their needs.

"Free software is a matter of liberty, not price," according to GNU Project founder Richard Stallman,  who is widely considered the grandfather of the open-source movement (www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html).  "Think of ‘free' as in ‘free speech,' not as in ‘free beer.' "

Knowingly or not, newspapers have long used open-source software—particularly on the Web, which was essentially built on a backbone of open-source applications and frameworks.

"Open source is not exotic any longer—it's part of your daily life," says Robert Cauthorn, chief executive officer of social-media company CityTools (www.citytools.net), which uses open source throughout its news and classified products. "Google was built atop open source. So is the Mac you might use. Every day, all day long, if you do anything other than work in Microsoft Office, you are using open source. It's not ready for prime time, it is prime time."

What has changed, though, is that newspapers are no longer only taking from the open-source movement—they're also giving back. Several newspaper companies and suppliers have donated work of their own to open-source projects, often at the same time as they build commercial projects atop these shared efforts.

"The strength of open source is that everyone contributes a little bit, and those contributions add up to a greater whole," says Ken Rickard, deputy vice president for strategic development for Morris DigitalWorks (www.morrisdigitalworks.com), which uses the Drupal (www.drupal.org) open-source Web-application framework and has borrowed from and contributed to its active developer community for three years.

Tweaking and contributing to software development is at the heart of the free speech vs. free beer distinction, and open source has come a long way from its anti-establishment homebrew roots. Its backers argue it also offers a way for newspapers to rethink the entire way they approach technology.

"Newspaper operations that don't pay close attention to open source and deploy it whenever possible are making a grave error," Cauthorn says. "That said, I think there are big mental hurdles that newspapers need to make before they really can make the transition."

Leave a LAMP on
The driver behind the surge in open-source applications in recent years has been LAMP. The acronym stands for the Linux operating system, Apache Web server, MySQL database and the Python/PHP/Perl programming languages, a potent combination of open-source tools that allows programmers to quickly build powerful, scalable Internet applications.

The keyword there, for newspapers and suppliers, is "quickly." Consider Morris DigitalWorks, which began exploring open-source projects in 2004 to speed the development of Web applications for the group's newspapers and other customers. It settled on the Drupal framework because of its power as a development tool, Rickard says. An intranet for the company's ad-sales force followed shortly afterward, but the need for speed was put to the test when Morris announced plans in April 2005 to launch Bluffton (S.C.) Today, which  uses citizen-media content from its Web site, www.blufftontoday.com, to publish a tabloid by the same name.

"We had about six weeks to build the entire site," Rickard says. "Drupal allowed us to do two very important things—get a robust community site online very quickly and discard some legacy thinking about what newspaper Web sites should be."

Speed also was the rationale behind the creation of Django at the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World in 2003. "It let us build Web sites very efficiently," says Adrian Holovaty, who helped to build the framework when he was a staff member at the paper's World Online division. Two years later, the Journal-World released Django into the open-source world, where it continues being developed—including by Holovaty, who left World Online but still contributes to Django's open-source community (www.djangoproject.com) while developing his own EveryBlock.com site as part of a Knight News Challenge grant (www.newschallenge.org/winners.html). In the meantime, the Journal-World's parent, The World Co., used Django to build Ellington, a commercial content-management system it markets through its Mediaphormedia subsidiary (www.mediaphormedia.com).

Open-source tools are often adopted for use in more sophisticated, commercial applications. Consider Zope Corp., a spinoff of newspaper-owned technology provider InfiNet, which open-sourced its own Web framework (zope.org) in 1998. Nearly a decade later, Zope Corp. still exists side by side with its open-source progeny, developing commercial products for clients including Boston.com and GateHouse Media Inc. in Fairport, N.Y. While the company drives the development of Zope, scores of outside contributors report bugs and contribute new features.

"The early years of open source focused on free [as in beer] software... but we have seen a definite shift in thinking," Simon Phipps, chief technology evangelist at Sun Microsystems, wrote in an online commentary published on CNET's news.com (www.news.com/2010-1071-954384.html). "The open-source community has welcomed companies that build commercial enterprises, as long as they act symbiotically rather than parasitically."

Morris DigitalWorks employees regularly contribute bug fixes and documentation to the broader Drupal project. MySite, Rickard's own contribution, allows users to customize Drupal-powered sites. "What people sometimes fail to grasp about open source is that it tends to be a meritocracy," he says. "If you [want to] participate in the process of decision making, it is a lot easier if you have some ‘code equity' in play."

But what publishers get in return may well be worth it. For instance, non-Morris contributors recently added integration with Facebook and Google's Open Social platform to Drupal. Because open-source programmers are focused on security and keeping software current, often fixes arise for "problems you haven't even envisioned yet," Rickard says.

While the brunt of open-source activity in newspapers centers around the Internet, options abound through all functional areas. Customer relationship management (CRM) software options are maturing, as are intranet, calendaring and messaging solutions. With a host of open-source SQL options, database applications also are candidates, so long as they're not bolted to a proprietary repository. There's even an open-source page-layout application, Scribus (www.scribus.net), though "it's not quite there yet," Cauthorn says. "Give it another year or so." In the meantime, there's always OpenOffice, a free and highly functional alternative to Microsoft's suite of applications, to start playing with.

One piece of the puzzle that's still missing: something to manage workflow between the Web and print. "The application that nails that," Rickard says, "will make a giant leap forward."

Cultural Shifts
Even when open-source tools are ready for prime time, the challenge for newspapers isn't as simple as downloading the latest software.

"Newspapers have never really fancied themselves as technology companies," Cauthorn says, "and tended to adopt an approach to IT departments that stressed vendor management over acquisition of actual technological skills." Because of a long-term resistance to invest in technical training, he argues, "most aren't truly in control of their own technological future."

That's why a price tag of zero isn't always the strongest sell. "The part that comes easily to newspaper companies is the obvious reason: open-source software is free," Holovaty says. "The difficult part can be justifying a change in technology plans for a company that has invested lots of money in proprietary software."

But it doesn't have to be that way. Consider the movie industry, itself besieged by the same digital paradigm challenging newspapers. Studios and production houses joined forces on the Studio Linux project (www.studio-linux.org), and now virtually every motion picture is produced using applications powered by Linux workstations. "They all regard themselves as at least one-third technology companies, albeit inspired by content motives," Cauthorn says.

A similar effort, called the Open Editor project, was unveiled at NEXPO®06. Created by Tucson (Ariz.) Citizen newsroom systems manager Joel Rochon, the wiki-like site (www.open-editor.org) has lagged but includes a list of open-source applications with which newspapers can experiment.

And experimenting may be the best way to move forward, Cauthorn notes. "What happens in that process is that your talented staff...will be invigorated," he says. "New ideas will spring forth new possibilities. And you'll save your companies tons of money." Of course, there's a catch: "Like democracy itself, being free means thinking on your own."

Which brings us back to free speech. Rickard points to the use of Drupal by journalists in countries such as Egypt, Myanmar and Iraq. "We are helping to support access to free software that helps people write, publish and distribute content despite government objections," Rickard says. "That enables free speech."