Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the technical platform?
- What is Open Source?
- What's in it for Bellevue?
- What's in it for other Churches?
- What about the fact that there is not a software company behind it?
- Who owns this site?
- Who owns the copyright for the bvcms code?
- How much data will it hold?
What is the technical platform?
- Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5
- MVC (model, view, controller) and WebForms
- C#, Javascript, jQuery
- LINQ to SQL
- SQL Server 2008
What is Open Source?
Open source software is computer software code that is made available to the public under a software license agreement that permits users to use, change and improve the software and redistribute it under the terms of the license agreement. Open source software is free (there is no purchase price) but it does have obligations to users. bvcms is licensed under the GNU General Public License which requires any derived works to be made available under the same license. This guarantees that the project will be forever free to users and developers.
What's in it for Bellevue?
There are several ways Bellevue benefits from making its software available under an open source license.
- Bellevue is able to cooperate with other churches to keep the project alive and continuously improving.
- Bellevue shares future development costs with other contributing churches.
- Bellevue gets the joy of giving to the Christian community at large.
- Other churches will contribute ideas that Bellevue has not considered but will no doubt benefit from in the future.
What's in it for other Churches?
- Churches receive the ability to control the future development of the church management system (ChMS). No longer is a church dependent upon a proprietary vendor whose decisions are oftentimes motivated primarily by financial gain.
- The system is designed by users for users.
- The danger of being abandoned by a company due to any number of reasons is mitigated by having the source code to the system. Should the original developers discontinue the project anyone can continue to improve the project with the available source code.
Who supports the software if there is no software company behind it?
- There is a large church using the software (Bellevue)
- There is a company behind the software (see next question). That company just doesn't make any money selling licenses to the software (it sells services).
Who owns this site?
Usage Defined Software — a software development and consulting company owned by David Carroll, the developer of bvcms for Bellevue.
Who owns the copyright for the bvcms code?
Bellevue Baptist Church
How much data will bvcms hold?
Lots more than we have ever seen on the system.
Bellevue is a large church with lots of people and lots of historical data. Here are the stats on Bellevue:
count People 162,700 Organizations 5,280 Meetings 435,000 Attendances 1,210,000 Contributions 2,162,200 Staff Users 178 Lay Users 407 Typical Users/day 200 Page Views/day 4,000