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Silicon Chisel was founding in 2000, at the height of the “dot com boom.” The idea was to provide seasoned, expert technical guidance to start-up companies, without saddling them with the excessive salaries that many transitioning executives were demanding due to the staffing shortages at the time.

When the “bubble burst,” Silicon Chisel went back to more traditional technical consulting, focusing on open-source and source-licensed technology. The lessons of the years of exponential growth was that traditional commercial online infrastructure was expensive to buy, license, and maintain – and often restricted a company’s choices further down the road. Likewise it was found that many “web design” first were going about their business in a manner to maximize billable hours and retain control of every site produced. This is obviously not best for the client.

Open-source and source-licensed content systems all highly complex and rich sites to be built for a fraction of the cost of traditional authoring, and the web-based administration allows such sites to be run with smaller webmaster staffs without sacrificing anything as far as content delivery.

This site is a webzine of sorts, focusing on white papers describing the state of the industry as it pertains to open-source and source-licensed software and on evaulations of various products which many IT managers may not have had a chance to explore yet.

Note that every product described here is something that Silicon Chisel has used in developing a site. These are not”reviews” per se, but rather analysis of the products as seen by a developer. Most reviews focus more on cool features instead of how easy it is to extend and maintain the code. The other goal of delving into products is that because Open-Source is somewhat “under the radar,” there is just so many incredible pieces of software that remain undiscovered.

Guest editors are welcomed to provide content for Silicon Chisel’s site. Please use the contact form from the main menu for more information.

Silicon Chisel is owned and operated by Mark S. Miller. An industry veteran of over 25 years in the technology field, with most of that time spent in advanced development or new product development. Mr. Miller’s career is an almost even blend of consulting, start-up ventures, and Fortune 500 companies such as Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems.