Good point, Westlake. Our open source product and company have the same name. Now, does getting this certification hurt the open source effors we make? Hmmmm. It's a question. We care a lot about our open source community. Truly. We don't take open source lightly. In my opinion, if we can stay true to our open source goals (BSD and listen to community) and be more attractive to clients (so we can pay people to make more open source software) then there's no harm done. I realize this is a touchy area for a lot of people. Hell, if you would have told me a year ago I'd have an ms certified product in a year's time, I would have asked what kind of crack you were smoking. What changed? Understanding who uses our stuff. But that doesn't change our attitude towards open source. In fact, it strengthens prior attitudes. Because the open source ideal must always be protected :) All good, Brian

Thanks! We're proud of that, too. :) Brian from SilverStripe

Hi, I'm Brian, the CEO of SilverStripe. Thanks for your kind words; they mean a lot. To your question of "Why?" here's the answer: it helps our business. We have many potential clients who run MS IT infrastructures. If we have this certification that greatly increases the confidence in SilverStripe in the eyes of the decision-makers in these organizations. We did not make this decision lightly. We thought a lot about how this would be perceived in the open source community. All along the way we said we'd back out if we thought our principles were being compromised. I am proud to say that we're happy with the outcome. Microsoft actually helped us (in dev resource time) to get our software to work well on the MS stack. Now we can tell more people we can work in their environment. It's truly as simple as that. :) Hope that answers your question. If anyone reading this wants to follow up, I am my first name at silverstripe dot com Thanks, Brian

Hi. I'm the CEO of SilverStripe http://silverstripe.com/ . We make an open-source CMS (BSD license) and we've been in business for about eight years as a commercial entity. I agree with the posts here who've said you need to focus on the community of people, you need to scratch your own itch, and you may be able to make money selling a customised version of your app.

In our case, our CMS was closed-source for the first seven years as we built websites for clients. In fact, we never set out to build a CMS, really. We were building sites and needed a way for site owners & content editors to change content on their own sites. A year or so ago, we open-sourced and are very glad we did.

Our company has 16 staff and we make money by customising our open source offering on a case-by-case basis for our clients. We have no shortage of work coming in and our community is growing. We offer a number ways for people to contribute to our project and we provide free support to our community via forums, IRC, and in general, however we can.

Again, scratch your own itch! Make your software useful (profitable) to you first. You may be able to open source it simultaneously, but keep in mind there is the maintenance / upkeep of the community to consider.

Good luck to you. -- Brian Calhoun (b r i a n @ NOSPAM s i l v e r s t r i p e . c o m)