Hello Open Source World

If you are not familiar with Composite C1 lets start with a very compact intro for devs: Composite C1 is a web CMS that run on top of IIS and .NET 4 and ASP.NET 4. It’s primarily intended to remove all the drama and markup goo that classic ASP.NET apps give you and at the same time Composite C1 aims at enabling users and front-end developers to do much more, on their own. Front-end developers have excellent markup control (go ahead, view the page source) and can work with CSS, JavaScript etc. without fighting the CMS. It’s a user and front-end developer friendly system which let ASP.NET and .NET developer hook in when needed and enable them to use all the yummy features of .NET to feed data and functionality to consumers. You can build dynamic web UI using ASP.NET Controls, MVC, XSLT, JavaScript or raw markup using XElement. The data layer is type safe, dynamic, 100% LINQ oriented and run on both XML and SQL Server. Composite C1 come with build in profiling and instrumentation features, is nicely layered and has a rich provider based model that let you go deep if needed. And the administrative web UI is really beautiful and nice to use. And so on…

Today we are very excited and happy to announce that Composite C1 is free open source software. Go download it and use it as you like!

Why would we do such a thing? We have a pretty awesome piece of software, but being a very webby techy company our sales and marketing abilities are … let’s say lacking. Despite an economic crisis and all we did okay, but having built something like Composite C1 “doing okay” just doesn’t cut it. We would much rather have the whole world see what we have built and if you are a small software shop with limited funds for sales and marketing there really is just one obvious solution: Giving developers and customers both a price and a level of freedom that’s really hard to say no to and by that activate the dynamics of the developer community. That’s why we are going open source.

To be truthful we also expect this to make good business sense. The vast majority of Composite C1 users will use it for free, but a small fraction will be companies that want something extra and we will happily provide them with that. But Composite C1 – in its entirety and un-crippled – is free open source. All documentation, videos and our developer tools are free as well. We charge money for ‘easy auto upgrade’ subscriptions, support and features targeting larger companies.

We want you!

If you are a front-end, XSLT or web developer on the ASP.NET platform this is all for you. If you like what you see and use Composite C1 all we ask in return is that we may count you as part of our community and that you share opinions, ideas and some of the cool things you build with us.

If you think that what we are doing is cool please help us get some attention and spread the word – let’s get the developer community involved and build a great open source CMS on .NET!

Get involved!