What do you mean its not open source?

Thats right, EPiServer is not another open source CMS. Its closed source, commercial software. And in my opinion this has a lot to do with the success of EPiServer (9000+ web sites use EPiServer), in a market that is absolutely awash with free, open source content management systems, and literally thousands of (often) home grown web CMS's that have been cobbled together by well meaning, but typically under resourced web agencies, with little experience in designing scalable, maintainable, extensible, and not to mention quality software products.

The sheer number of CMS's out there in the market today is absolutely ridiculous. Most estimates put the number well over 2000, and that is likely to be on the low side as most of the home grown CMS's are not even advertised. Then you need to count in all the slightly modified open source CMS's that have been branched away from their original source code by modifications, leaving the poor web site owner with an orphaned product which cannot easily be updated to a newer version.

I'm all for consumer choice and variety, but maintaining so many near-identical products is just an enormous waste of human effort. Think how much better these products could be if just some of these fragmented development efforts were to unite, share their thoughts, and reduce duplicated effort. There is simply no way all these products and open source initiatives can continue to thrive. Consolidation is inevitable, and that means the end for the less successful CMS's out there.

Open source projects are not immune to failure - you'll hear more from me about this soon. I have nothing against open source software, in fact I think the movement has an emormous amount to offer society, I just happen to think that it is not a silver bullet for all scenarios, and that the apparent savings in license fees are all too often lost on development hours, or lack of availability of suitably experienced developers, lack of support, and delayed projects.