On April 17th, we published Cofax as open-source software on SourceForge. Anyone can now download, use, and modify the content management system that powers the web sites of Knight Ridder’s newspapers.

This is a significant decision for a major media company. Knight Ridder invested real money and real engineering time building Cofax. The instinct in most corporations is to protect that investment by keeping the software proprietary. We went the other direction.

The reasoning is straightforward. Cofax was built to solve a problem that every newspaper faces: getting content from the newsroom onto the web efficiently. Twenty Knight Ridder newspapers are running Cofax today, with another ten scheduled to go live soon. In February, Sun Microsystems featured Cofax as the top story on their Java homepage. The software works. But keeping it locked inside Knight Ridder limits its impact.

If a newspaper in another chain, or an independent paper, or a news organization in another country can use Cofax to publish their content, that is good for the industry. It means more newsrooms spending time on journalism instead of web production mechanics. And if those organizations improve Cofax along the way, by fixing bugs, adding features, or adapting it to environments we have not tested, everyone benefits. That is how open-source development works.

I wrote about sharing code with the Perl community back in 1996. The principle is the same at any scale. If you solve a problem, share the solution. Do not make the next person solve it from scratch. CPAN works because thousands of individual programmers believe this. We are applying the same idea at the level of an enterprise application.

The team that builds and maintains Cofax: Patrick Carter serves as senior director of technology and is instrumental in the architecture and technical leadership. Karl Martino, Sam Cohen, and Toan Dang are the senior engineers on the core development. Derek Dinh handles systems and database administration. Don Henry leads the project from the production side and manages the rollout to newspaper after newspaper. Hung Dao builds key components of the system. Charles Harvey manages site operations and keeps everything running in production. Robert Tartamosa handles web site usage analysis, giving us the data to understand how Cofax performs at scale.

Open-sourcing Cofax also helps with trust. When you are asking a newsroom to depend on your software for their daily publishing operation, transparency matters. They can read the code. They can verify that it does what we say it does. They can assess the quality of the engineering themselves. Proprietary software asks you to trust the vendor. Open-source software lets you verify.

There is also a practical benefit for Knight Ridder. Open-source projects attract talented developers who want to work on software that matters. Cofax is a real system serving real newsrooms at production scale. That is more interesting to a good engineer than most corporate projects.

The SourceForge page is live and the code is available. I am curious to see what happens next.