Its recently been revealed how the CBC powers its websites using Open Source software. This software is essentially free to use and its continually improved by a variety of developers around world that contribute their improvements for free.

Its great to see a pseudo government organization and especially a media company using the advantages of open-source. It would be great to get more incite into why they chose open source and whats worked well and what hasn’t.

CBC has run some very popular marketing campaigns and without any concerns about scalability, security or any of the other FUD ( Fear, Uncertainty, Denial ) thats spread by more proprietary software vendors. While the total cost for licensing of all the open source components has been zero dollars it would be interesting to get total costs of maintenance, development etc.. compared to other systems. I expect the open source solution would still come out cheaper and provide companies like the CBC with greater flexibility.

More information on the CBC use of open source software is available here.