Liferay: A Portal and Content Management Platform Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

The case offers practical insights for developing and managing a software product. Liferay followed an open source development model for its portal and content management system. Under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) license, Liferay’s flagship portal is offered that dramatically helped the users in accessing, developing, and distributing its source code, and to re-license their derivative work. In Liferay’s adoption process the open-source licensing has major implications. Liferay portal was downloaded by the companies without any charges that they try for diverse business requirements and engage the vendor for quality service level agreements for more advanced usage support. However, some of the developers and users who are not the part of Liferay, play a significant role in software development. Although, this easy access has also enabled various software institutions to utilize the benefits of Liferay’s advancements where these institutions repackage the software after a little modification in Liferay’s source code, especially in its core system. By 2010, these practices have come to peak. The recent platform approach that Liferay has started to pursue mainly base on the core system’s consistency and stability and in the presence of source code modification threat, the core system could be affected badly and could become non-standardized. It is needed the CEO to devise a strategy that could support the recent adopted platform approach, but simultaneously retain Liferay’s integrated with open source. While, the other option for Liferay is to completely abandon open source.