Open Source Delivers

What does compliance mean to your IT and software development organization?  Most often compliance with external regulations and/or internal controls is treated as a secondary requirement for IT applications, their development and delivery.   It inevitably leads to cost overruns, delays and rework with little to no reuse.   The cost of complying with regulatory reform, such [...]

Jeff Hammond of Forrester Research talks about the “iron triangle” of software development. “Schedule, features, cost…pick any two,” is the way he describes it. He often brings this up in the context of open source and multi-source development taking the position that open source lets dev teams soften up the iron and improve on all [...]

It’s cold and flu season, and what better time to try to eliminate the “viruses” from open source software licensing? Open source advocates can be pedantic about terminology, and flame wars about using the right words are tedious.  Many in the technology world are put off by wars of words, because they don’t think they [...]

Software audits are not a new concept for many IT organizations. Yet, the importance of these software code assessments is often undervalued.  As Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin pointed out in a recent blog, companies are increasingly relying on software to differentiate themselves and today, that means developing with open source software (OSS).  Gartner [...]

Talend, a licensor of open source enterprise software, has recently received a ruling from the U.S. Customs Service corroborating that its software complies with the Trade Agreements Act 0f 1979 (19 USC 2511 et seq.) (“TAA”). Open source software adoption by the US Federal government must comply with many regulations, some of which can be [...]

In a previous posting, I argued that open source governance is an essential IT process and a natural extension to existing IT governance.  Without the visibility and controls provided by a governance solution, the use of external code (like open source) by IT to build new applications, products and services can create unwanted technical, operational [...]

Imagine for a moment you’re the CIO of a Global 2000. You’re responsible for your company’s IT services and infrastructure, as well as how well technology investments support the overall mission of the business and its employees.  Your company has tens or hundreds of thousands of external customer relationships that depend on your systems, with [...]

Mergers and acquisition activity is beginning to pick up again after a few lean years. In my job as open source advocate at Dell, which has acquired a number of software companies, this means more time spent determining if open source code is present in the code base of an acquisition target. Gartner issued a [...]

Does your organization’s IT governance framework include the governance and management of open source components? We asked this question during a webinar with the ISACA organization and the responses were curious.  Full disclosure, the audience was made up of ISACA members, so most if not all webinar attendees are currently using COBIT as a governance [...]

I’m an engineer because I want to understand how things work and I love to expand on that knowledge to make new things work. Recently I stumbled upon an analysis of web browser architecture. It is not surprising that most details in this analysis are from open source browsers (e.g. Google Chrome, Firefox), as opposed [...]