OpenACS

Q: When did you start and what was your motivation?
A: I started with the original ACS as I was employed at ArsDigita. When they moved on to Java and changed some other policies, I found that OpenACS is a vivid community which could continue the good groundwork done by the early ArsDigitans: To build a community system, which is applicable to a lot of scenarios and is free for all to use.

Q: How many people are involved and how is the project organised?
A: Roughly 50 developers in the core team, many more in the interested community. The project is run by a few dedicated people, who do most of the coding and therefore have the respect of the other developers. They have control of the CVS repository and make sure, new submissions dont brake the system.

Q: What is your target audience or market?
A: Organizations interested in community software.

Q: Which functions and tools are supported
A:

Q: Which open source license is applied?
A: GPL

Q: Which development environment or programming languages are used?
A: Emacs ;-). TCL, sometimes Java, as well as the procedural languages of the supported databases (e.g. Oracle and Postgres)

Q: Do you offer paid support?
A: There are companies within the community offering paid support. We are one of them.

Q: What are your long term goals and strategies?
A: Make OpenACS the solution for Knowledge Communities and E-Learning. So CMS is just a side product of the system, though other stakeholders of the community might have a different perspektive. Thats the nice thing about it anyway, as the ACS is a toolkit with which you can make a lot of solutions for a multiple number of scenarios and are not limited to one thing.