Presto is currently transitioning from licensed to open source software.  Open Source software solutions are increasingly hailed as economical and reliable ways to carry out website, database and other IT projects.  Presto currently is still tied to licensed software insofar as it runs on Coldfusion by Adobe.  In the long run, we don't have objections to making Presto completely open source (moving from Cold Fusion to PHP; moving from MSSQL server to MySQL), but this will take new resources to justify.  Our Presto R&D money used to be funded by a chunk of the license fee; now we're using a part of the installation fee for this.

What are our general thoughts about commercial vs. open source licenses?  The short answer is that the larger the project size, the less the up-front cost difference between free open source and licensed software matters; most of the costs are in implementing and maintaining particular design & software rules for the project, and this is influenced largely by the functionality of the CMS's in question, and the longevity and stability of the contracting firms that are supporting these CMS's.

Financially, the question breaks down into a comparison of up-front cost, development time, and ongoing support.  A deeper, more long term analysis also compares the profile of the organizations that support open source and licensed solutions, to see what software niches each will gravitate towards in the future.

We have already used open source software as part of Presto.  We use the http://FCKEditor.net editor and we also utilize CFX openimage (by Jukka Manner), which enables Presto to generate new icons for each type of content. 

We now provide Presto as unencrypted code, and point out where modifications are best made that will still enable upgrading to subsequent versions of Presto (the code gets "forked" as they say).  We have attempted to separate the core Presto code from code that would likely be customized by clients, to enable Presto installations to be customized as much as possible while still able to take advantage of upgrades.

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