The open source platforms I admire the most, and are most useful for business, are the ones with the largest communities behind them.  For open business platforms, it’s not just the contributions to the core software that matter.  It’s the number of extensions (or modules) and the number of themes (or styles) that’s critical.  Having many extensions and themes to choose from give business users the best of both worlds:  a standard software package, and lots of easy customization possibilities.

I presented some preliminary research on open source communities for business platforms at OSCOMM 2009, the first international workshop on open source communities, held after OSS 2009 in Skövde, Sweden.  Our data shows that the best supported platform with the highest number of community-contributed extensions is WordPress, followed by Joomla, phpBB, MediaWiki, and Drupal.  Moodle, SugarCRM, Elgg, Magento, and Gallery are the next five, with not much in the way of community contributions after that.  Only award-winning open source software packages that a business user would directly interact with were included.

The paper and slides are available at the OSCOMM program website.  The paper is called “Community Building for Open Source Business Applications:  The Core-Extensions-Theme Pattern”.