Backgrounder FAQ

License

Daisy is licensed using the Apache License 2.0, which is a BSD-style license. Basically, this license grants the user of Daisy the right to do anything he or she wants with the software, both in a commercial and non-commercial context. Daisy can be redistributed inside for-pay software, and the Daisy source code can be ripped into pieces and be used inside another CMS or web application. There's no license fee involved, so Daisy is both free and open source. The only requirement laid out in our license is that no-one can use the Daisy name to endorse his own endeavours without our consent, and that derivative projects based on Daisy should be crediting us.

Apache Daisy? cocoondev.org?

Apparently, quite a few folks misunderstand the relation between Daisy and Apache, or Daisy and Apache Cocoon. Daisy borrows the license of The Apache Software Foundation, but nothing else. Outerthought, the main Daisy contributors, however also contributes to Apache, most notably through its collaboration inside the Apache Cocoon project community. Outerthought has, amongst other things, donated the Cocoon Form handling framework to Cocoon, which obviously is also being used inside Daisy.

Hence, Daisy is not an Apache project. It is hosted on cocoondev.org, a website sponsored by Outerthought, which provides some common project infrastructure (mainly SVN and mailing lists) to Cocoon-related, but non-Apache open source projects. There's more projects hosted on cocoondev.org then Daisy alone. The intellectual property rights of the initial Daisy releases is owned by Outerthought and Schaubroeck, and future versions' IP will be owned by both these parties and Daisy's future contributors.

Who is paying for Daisy? What's driving its agenda? How can I get new stuff added fast?

Daisy's initial release (October 2004) has been funded by Schaubroeck, a Belgian e-government solution provider and a customer of Outerthought. Copyright is owned jointly by Outerthought and Schaubroeck. We invite other parties, interested in funding continued development of Daisy, to contact Outerthought. While Outerthought supports the Daisy open source project and its community of users and contributors to the best of its abilities, we are a company and paid work gets done first. This business model has proven successful in the past for both us and the open source projects we maintain, and we hope this will be the case for Daisy as well. Outerthought is fully committed to making Daisy happen as a long-term endeavour, and we hope people will feel invited to be a part of it. Needless to say, we welcome bug reports, comments, patches and other contributions: see you on the mailing list!

Why Daisy? Why yet another CMS?

We believe that Daisy is unique in many perspectives, more specifically because of its hierarchy-freeness, the rich-text editor which adapts itself according to changes in the document type schemes, its query capabilities, its centralized ACL system and its clear separation between repository server and front-end application. Daisy is a content and/or information management system with powerful website-publishing capabilities, rather than a website management system.

We don't want to do lenghty comparisons between Daisy and other CMS systems, since we believe such comparisons should be made with specific project requirements in mind. We invite users to install Daisy alongside another CMS and see what fits them best.

Why didn't you contribute to Apache Lenya instead?

Daisy and Lenya are very different. From what we understand, Lenya is more targeted towards XML-based website management. We had some different, unique ideas (see above) and goals when we started designing Daisy. The easiest way to achieve these goals was to implement Daisy independently from other CMS projects: we freed our minds like Neo did when swallowing the red pill. We share the same Cocoon heritage however, and we both firmly believe that Cocoon is an excellent framework to develop structured, content-rich and highly-dynamic CMS applications with. Besides, Michi and Gregor are excellent folks to hang out with late at night.