"Our own research, however, has concluded that open source software exposes users to significant and unnecessary business risk, as the security is often overlooked, making users more vulnerable to security breaches," said Fortify vice president, Richard Kirk."

and then

"Government needs to stop thinking that when it comes to procuring IT systems, big is always beautiful," writes Osborne. "We need to move in the direction of what are known as 'open standards' - in effect, creating a common language for government IT. This technical change is crucial because it allows different types of software and systems to work side by side in government." - Chancellor George Osborne

At least based on the quotes in the article, which granted may not fully represent Osborne's platform, they are confusing OSS with open standards.

I might be reinventing the wheel of this argument, but just to make sure it's articulated: Do we really need to encourage more programmers to reinvent the wheel on the CMS? I feel like that approach should be discouraged for the sake of all of the non-technical users out there who have to deal with engineer-built back-end interfaces that tend to result from projects like what one would use this book to approach.

Even major, enterprise-level CMS solutions would probably benefit from starting with an off-the-shelf solution that has a back-end with a few years of solid UI refinement behind it and extending that with whatever functionality is required, though an API or otherwise.

The perfect CMS may not have been invented yet, but programmers need to realize that they're not going to make a better one from scratch. They're just going to make another mediochre entry for the left column of CMS Matrix. Why not choose one of the dominant options out there, join it's development community, and start working to make it solve your problems?

I haven't read this book and it may well provide a good overview of the basic architectural questions one would want to be familiar with to approach an existing system. And I'm certainly not saying it should be published. But a book like this should, I feel, at least start with a discussion of _why_ you would want to build a CMS from scratch, before it gets into how.