Redbridge Council: Open Source or not?

An interesting news article landed on my desk this morning, talking about Redbridge Council‘s ground breaking new website. There’s a video you can watch all about the benefits the council and it’s citizens are enjoying, but the bit that caught my eye was the statement:

The council is keen to make “Redbridge i” features available to other authorities free-of-charge and has developed the site in opensource technologies for maximum compatibility.

“Oooh, yummy, Open Source“, I thought, so I popped down to have a look at their website. The website has cool bits, users can customise the layout, add new content boxes and personalise all their information. There’s also good use of Google Maps to show geographically relevant mashups of council information.

Digging further, I discovered that the website was built with Immediacy CMS, a .Net CMS package that is far from being Open Source. In fact, the Enterprise License costs around £30,000, and that’s without the cost of the plugin packs advertised on their website. Open Source? How can you call that Open Source? Anyway, I wrote to Immediacy to find out if they did have an Open Source version of the package. Don’t really want to be jumping the gun … I’ll keep you posted ..

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