(Panorama view in full)
Since this month I am working over at Dutch Open Projects, an Open Source implementer in the Netherlands that specialises in PHP; zend, symfony, SugarCRM, Joomla and Drupal. Doing both Drupal and Joomla is fine with me, both have a place in the CMS landscape. And the goals of DOP is to offer the right Open Source solution for the customers needs, not to start a holly war of one Open Source tool against another.

Since the headquarter of DOP is located at a very nice place, we often hold x-camps at our place. Dont be surprised that a deer wonders by the swimmingpool out of the forrest behind our villa! Some time ago we had the SymfonyCamp over at our place. And we do have enough room for lots of tents and a BBQ.

See the full symfony pool at fickr.

We are planning on organizing a Joomla!/Drupal camp over a next couple of month. And the use the healthy competition between the two projects and to use the power of Open Source, we had the following idea:

From both communities a couple of dozen people can signup and camp at our place for a weekend. During this weekend both have the assignment to make as many migration tools as possible to migrate from the dominant proprietary CMS-es in the Netherlands; GX, Greenvaley, Smartsite and Tridion towards their CMS. The one who does the most or best wins. And since all the migration code has to be GPL, the Open Source community at large wins as well!

Note that this is only the first idea, we have to get "development licenses" for all these CMS-es and provide demo installs of all these as well. So the final assignment might be different from this one if this one is not practical. Our goal is not to make profit of the camp, not by far. So the entrenance fee will be free or very low. Why do we invest in these camps? To align with the communities, to get exposure but most of all to give the proprieatry CMS users a way out towards freedom. And we hope it doesnt hurt for our recruiting proces; we are hiring!

We try to get many high ranking officers from both communities to (re)present their CMS but there will be room as well for "the soldiers". If you are interested, drop a comment; it will be published within 8 hours. Or you can drop me a line; bertATborlanDOTcm. I will post more information about this "J/D vs the RotW" camp when it comes available.

And yes, our halfpipe pool will be cleaned before this event I hope, so be sure to bring your bikini as well