Publishers, individuals, implementation partners, industry partners, and the Thunder Core Team form the Thunder Coalition.
We believe that publishers do not compete with each other through technology, but rather through content and brands.
Technology is a rather limiting factor for publishers because, for example, content management systems are often expensive and launch projects consume considerable amounts of time and money. That is why the German publisher Hubert Burda Media established the Thunder Coalition which aims to join forces with publishers by sharing code and innovation power. The goal is to spend less money overall by working together- and not to receive money from others.
The Thunder Coalition’s core product is the open-source content management system Thunder. Coalition Members develop useful modules, use them for their own purposes and share them with the community by publishing them under the GNU General Public License. Neither Hubert Burda Media nor the other publishers in the Coalition charge anyone for their contributions.
The Thunder Coalition is formed to attract as many publishers worldwide as possible – as users of the Thunder distribution and as contributors to the technology. The number of users is directly related to the richness and usefulness of the functionality provided and therefore to the number of contributors.
The goals of the coalition are
- to enable publishers to deploy rich functionality for their products very quickly and at reasonable cost,
- to share functionality among publishers, driving the industry and providing excellent user experience with the individual content,
- to enable industry partners to spread their outstanding services amongst publishers and to charge for premium services as the publishers grow, and
- to enable implementation partners to gain knowledge about Thunder programming and implementation in order to provide services to publishers and industry partners.