SECTION THREE
3. What is Postnuke?
PostNuke is a community, content, collaborative management system. It's your electronic toolbox, a set of tools allowing you to build a dynamically generated web site that five years ago would have cost thousands of dollars to launch. (http://news.postnuke.com/)
3.1 Postnuke version .726 (beta)
The most recent (stable) version of Postnuke is version .726. You will notice that this isn't even up to version 1.0. This basically means that while the product is stable and useful it isn't finished! Of course, the price is right - it is FREE. This is because the product is an Open Source Project. Still, despite Postnuke's unfinished state, it is used on literally thousands of publicly accessible websites throughout the world, in many different languages. It is one of the best CMSs available.
3.2 What is Open Source?
Open Source is a topic that is too large to adequately cover here. However, think of the last time you bought a piece of software. Remember clicking through or tossing aside some legal looking document with a lot of small print? That was the End User License Agreement (EULA). That EULA dictates the terms of use of the software that you purchased. Often, if you were to read that document carefully, you would discover that you haven't actually purchased anything! You are simply borrowing the software from the company and you don't own a thing. They also won't allow you to change the software in anyway or re-distribute it for any purpose.
Open Source is the opposite. Open Source also has an EULA. In fact there are several, but the most common is the GNU General Public License (available here: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html). This license allows the user to use, modify and redistribute the software in any way the user sees fit. They can charge or not charge for it. There are of course restrictions with any license, but this method of distribution is drastically different from the closed-source, corporate method. For more information, please start with the website mentioned above.