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OpenLogic and FOSSBazaar invite you to a webinar about stretching your budget with open source software:

Wednesday, December 9 2009
11:00am Pacific / Noon Mountain / 1:00pm Central / 2:00pm Eastern / 7:00pm GMT
Duration: 1 hour
Hosted by Kim Weins, Sr VP of Marketing for OpenLogic, and Rod Cope, OpenLogic's CTO and Founder

As budgets and priorities for 2010 begin to take shape, many enterprises are looking to open source as a way to stretch software budgets and meet business demands. In the last year, enterprises large and small have shifted to a proactive stance: striving to use open source whenever possible.

This webinar will explore the process of enterprise open source software adoption from the perspective of three key stakeholders within the typical organization: developers, architects, and CIOs. We'll examine the unique challenges and goals of each of these roles, giving you tips on:

By far the best session at the 451 Group Client Conference that I attended last week was a panel led by analyst Matthew Aslett titled “Open Source To the Rescue?”   When the 451 Group started their open source practice some years back, they named it “Commercial Adoption of Open Source” or CAOS which was a clever play on the state of extreme disorder and confusion that existed within enterprises trying to use and engage with open source at that time.  Today, no one remembers what all the fuss was about.   As Matt pointed out in his talk, open source is ubiquitous and pervasive; the Economist has declared that “Open-source software has won the argument.”

The Free and Open Source Software Learning Center hosted a debate between representatives for three different open source license alternatives.

I was asked to participate as one of the debaters, presenting my view of the advantages of the BSD license.

The 'debate' was very friendly in nature, and was very much intended to be informative and entertaining.

FOSSLC managed to get a great mix of debaters and judges - I think the judging reveals that people's license preference depends a lot on what you're doing with open source software.

Here's a link to the video of the debate (two hours!), and the judges' commentary.

http://www.fosslc.org/drupal/node/523

A lot of people seem to think that open source is a magic solution to project management and that open source projects will automatically attract a large and healthy community of contributors and users who will improve the software. This, of course, is not the case. In fact, creating a successful open source project is a really major and difficult effort. You have to deliver an initial promise that people find interesting, attract other people, then facilitate and lead the community, etc. You just have to look at all the failed projects on SourceForge that never delivered any code to see that "open source" is not a guarantee for success.

Open source developers may not realize it but in certain circumstances their work is subject to export regulation. When open source developers create an account on SourceForge.net they are required to agree to SF’s terms and conditions. Checking that innocuous little box to “opt-in,” they are acknowledging that they are aware and pledge to comply with Section 740.13(e) of the Export Administration Regulations (”EAR”) 15 C.F.R. Parts 730-772.

There are only three facts that you need to know about the above: