Open Source Delivers

No one knows the importance of communities more than community leaders. Yes, many of us are on Twitter and attending local networking meet-ups such as The Community Roundtable’s CRLive lunches, but I haven’t found a local get-together specifically for the folks who manage high-tech virtual communities in the Greater Boston area to dive deep on [...]

Last week, Ian Skerrett‘s blog, “What To Do With Open Source Freeloaders?” discussed how the term “freeloader” has been used to describe people and organizations that use open source, but need more encouragement to actively contribute back to the projects they are benefiting from. Where do you and your organization fall on the freeloader scale? Please answer our poll [...]

On occasion, people working on open source projects will lament how a lot of organizations are using the output of the open source project but not contributing back.  For instance, at Eclipse, we have millions of users but only tens of thousands of individuals who have opened a bug (a very basic way of contributing [...]

Despite all the snow that’s recently blanketed Germany, I was able to attend Enterprise Open Source Day in Nuremberg. Described by its organizers as an event for “open source enthusiasts and fans of the new, modern IT,” this year’s event focused on key trends including agile and mobile. These trends are of course not a [...]

Creating an open source software policy is a strategic imperative for organizations in the software industry.  But what does a strategic policy include, and how can you implement one? What is an OSS Management Policy? Let’s start by defining an open source management policy.  It is a set of rules and guidelines for using and [...]

Big companies have long been using popular open source projects – that’s nothing new.  What is new, however, are big companies taking on support of projects that already have a corporate sponsor. Revolution Analytics recently found itself in this position. The corporate sponsor of the R big data language recently found out that Oracle will [...]

This past weekend, GTUGs around the world met for a two-day hack-a-thon event to introduce Android application development to thousands of new people. The challenge was set to build an Android app, competing with other Google community groups around the world for global prizes. Local Android experts were available on site. I attended the local [...]

The U.S. federal government is not always the zippiest, most progressive organization in the world. With that backdrop, it is impressive to see the push being made to remove barriers to the use of open source software. Makes one proud to be an Amuhrcan! (for those who remember Lyndon B.) A couple weeks ago the [...]

Open innovation and industry collaborations are becoming more and more common as companies and industries look to modernize their R&D, optimize resources and even expand their partner ecosystems.  Andrew Aitken recognized this trend in ‘The Advent of Super Communities’ as something we see more and more in open source communities.   As Andrew has pointed out, [...]

2011 was a banner year for the open source community, especially for the Eclipse Foundation, which celebrated its 10th anniversary.  In that vein, I decided to look at 2011 open source project trends and compare them to popular Eclipse projects.  Using Ohloh.net, the free social directory of open source projects and developer resources (N.B.: Black [...]