Open Source Delivers

Black Duck Software and North Bridge Venture Partners, working with 451 Research, are conducting the sixth annual Future of Open Source Survey.  I took the survey, but one question caused me concern, considering what I do for a living.  Question 11 states, “OSS forges and foundations have played an important role in the past few [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

In the last number of years there has been a boom in the creation of new computer languages.  Some might wonder why we need so many new languages but one thing I have found is that software developers can be very passionate about software languages. Another gratifying trend is the ‘almost natural’ step for language [...]

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 [...]

As I look around the FOSS ecosystem I’m beginning to see a trend towards something I call “super communities,” or “communities of communities” – essentially, these super communities are vertical industry-driven open source communities. The core driver for these groups is the recognition by certain industries that a substantial portion of the software they develop [...]

SAP began its journey into the open source ecosystem more than ten years ago with the support of Linux as a reliable OS alternative and the selective use of mature open source products in our technology platform. Over the years, our engagement in open source projects was significantly increased. We are a major contributor to [...]

The stereotypical image of an open source project is a bunch of hackers working in dark rooms, scratching their itches and releasing software “when it is ready.” Of course, this is far from reality for many of the mainstream, mature open source communities like Linux, Mozilla, Eclipse and others. These open source communities have very [...]