Andrew Aitken's blog

In my previous entry I noted that small and medium businesses tend to develop governance policies adhoc and real time and are likely to be developed and run by IT. That is, as open source proliferates, the policies are more organic and evolve over time. They also tend to be more technically oriented and include fewer business terms or provisions.

Yesterday I moderated a panel at OSBC with three very sharp IT folks, Julien Lambert from Shimano, David Rossellat of EA and David Johnson from the LA Times. The topic was about the “Real Benefits of Open Source.” All three organizations are widely using open source but mostly throughout their infrastructure and only for a few applications. One interesting data point is that they each said that open source is now considered for every IT purchasing decision. They may choose a proprietary application if the fit is better but open source is considered every time. Towards the end of the panel we got into governance and licensing and IP compliance. Interestingly enough, most of the organizations had a developer driven governance model and it was self-policing. In two of the cases the IT managers were the ones educating the lawyers. Not sure if that’s a successful long term risk mitigation strategy?

The launch of some new endeavors goes quite smoothly, the iPod for example, and some don’t, evidence the iPhone. The launch of FOSSBazaar and FOSSology might fall into the latter category.

We can’t help ourselves. Here I sit with 15 of the most knowledgeable open source experts at a wonderful restaurant in Nuremberg, Germany at the Open Source Meets Business Conference, and we’re not talking about the great beer or the tasty Scheufelen but the GPLv2 vs. GPL v3.