Chris Pirillo, Robert Scoble and Open Source.

Chris Pirillo Talks CMS found from Robert's blog.

Saw this video of Chris Pirillo talking about a new WCMS/Publishing system he has decided to create (yes, yet another web content management system).

Needless to say I disagreed with just about everything he said but I was shocked that it would be possible for a passionate technologist such as me to be worlds apart from another guy in a similar space.

He kept ranting on and on about open source. He doesn't like WordPress because it's not "open source". Naturally he tries to imply that had it been open source he would have ripped it apart himself and made it better. He is now going to create his own publishing platform because nobody else gets it and he is going to do it better.

I don't buy it.

Don't get me wrong. He did make the point that most publishing platforms don't support the concept of publishing to many sources of information (and he would like to incorporate that). That's cool. I even decided to make a CMS at Dot Net Solutions and that was based on the concept that publishing content should be as simple as a "publish now" button in your Microsoft Word toolbar.

But why can't Chris do it in Word Press (or whatever). I strongly believe in Plug-ins, Extensibility and APIs/Web Services (so does Microsoft funnily enough). This gives you the best of both worlds i.e. good quality, supported software that can still do whatever you want it to do.

Software projects are immensely complex. If I was using a product I would far rather it was proprietary anyway because it would install some confidence in me about the quality of the internals, competence of the developers, procedures/methodologies in place during its development, the level of support I am going to get etc. i.e. "Joe Bloggs" hasn't been hacking around with the source code in his bedroom.

I strongly believe that good quality software is incredibly expensive to produce and for this reason alone the open source model is disastrously flawed. The average community technology preview that Microsoft releases is of higher quality than the production software of most ISVs or (in my opinion only) a lot of open source software.

I wouldn't be in such a rush to put this up had Chris not shown such a disregard for proprietary software (and making throw away comments like "PHP is the path of least resistance").

Flame me all you like but this is a reality check from my point of view (for what it's worth).