Open Source Delivers

Yes, today is the Facebook IPO debut, but it’s not the only thing that happened in the technology world this week. Red Hat’s signature open source platform turned ten, the Apache Foundation reported unprecedented growth, new mobile project data was released and Tizen is running Android apps!? Warning: no Facebook IPO stories below! May 15th [...]

With thousands of open source projects starting up each year, and thousands more struggling to get off the ground, it begs the question why some projects succeed while others do not. Is it about the problem that the project is solving? Is it about the approach to solving the problem? Is it about the vision [...]

At the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit a couple weeks ago, the Linux Foundation announced their annual “Who Writes Linux?” report. Amanda McPherson of TLF blogged about it on April 3, and her comments about what we can extract from the numbers ring true: the Linux Kernel is receiving more and more attention from companies and [...]

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 [...]

With all the open source stories from the week, HP and Google seemed to be the ones that got the most attention. HP open sourced the code for the Android kernel that was accidentally shipped with a number of its TouchPad tablets last year. In other Android news, Google previewed the integrations of its new [...]

Open source doesn’t work the way media narratives would like it to. You can’t see an announcement of something, then measure its immediate success in the market, and draw final conclusions about an open source effort. It’s not like the iPhone and its seemingly instant market penetration. Few understand this better than Josh McKenty. McKenty, [...]

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 [...]

We recently hosted a customer advisory board (CAB) meeting in Paris with many of our European customers to discuss best practices, trends and the future of FOSS in their organizations. Some of their observations shed interesting light on FOSS best practices, for example: Automation Capabilities We had an in-depth discussion about best practices for rolling [...]

Google was all over the news this week with the reveal of the Android 4.0 ICS and their decision to do “a fall sweep” by shutting down a number of their existing products. Here’s some of the media coverage on Google’s news and other open source stories from this week: “Apache vows to develop, protect OpenOffice” [...]

Thanks to the variety of great, free project hosting sites it has become very easy to publish source code and binaries on the web. This is evident in the hundreds of thousands of users adding projects / repositories on wildly popular sites like github, Google Code, SourceForge, CodePlex, and LaunchPad, to name a few.  With [...]