19 March 2007

I've spent most of my working Internet & web software development life delivering successful projects that meet stakeholder requirements and expectations. Too often clients come to me and people in my organisation (Platform Interactive) after:

• losing money with their current web site developer
• becoming dissatisfied with their web developer
• never achieving the results they were promised

The worst part of the whole equation is that more web development companies are cropping up, download security riddled shareware (Mambo, Joomla etc) implementing the software and not supporting it properly.

Don't get me wrong there are thousands of successful implementations of open source shareware running successful web sites that meet stakeholder requirements. At what point does this software become dangerous and unreliable?

There was a classic example of a irresponsible web development company in Melbourne that had about 100 installations of Mambo for clients. They didn't know what they were doing and of course in came the hackers...... end of story and of course the sites were not supported and the clients LOST their entire database.

It's a jungle out their and it is a buyer beware market.

Labels: project delivery, web projects

•  brian, 19 March, 2007 22:04

  Open Source is not shareware.
  
  Where is your evidence that either joomla or mambo are riddled with security holes.

   

•  David Barnes, 20 March, 2007 06:38

  Hi Brian
  
  The fact that 100 web sites were taken down because a back door was left on them and a hacker message left. I'll dig up the screen dumps if you like.
  
  The business that was hosting them was a local Melbourne company.
  
  Lets see - I get access to the source code - It isn't implemented properly and away we go- where lies the commercial liability - certainly not with Joomla or Mambo.