tbm's blog

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The Open Source Initative at FOSDEM

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The Board of Directors of the OSI typically conducts two face to face meetings each year. Our first meeting in 2009 will take place this week, just before FOSDEM, one of the largest open source conference for developers. We want to use this opportunity to be more visible in Europe, and to meet open source developers, users and policy makers.

We'll hold a presentation and a public meeting at FOSDEM. In our talk, we'll cover recent activities and discuss the future direction of the OSI, such as the introduction of a membership program. Our public meeting has a very open agenda and is aimed to discuss activities related to the OSI and other issues of interest to the open source community.

I hope to see many of you at FOSDEM!

Case stories of good and bad community interaction

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It is often argued that companies have to work with the FOSS community and there are good reasons for doing so. I've tried to collect a number of case stories of good and bad community interaction that may help as a starting point for further exploration of this topic:

European Commission publishes guidelines on the procurement of FOSS

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The Open Source Repository and Observatory (OSOR), a new site sponsored by the European Commission to foster the exchange of FOSS related information and software among European public administrations, recently published guidelines on the procurement of open source software. Public administrations in Europe have to follow public tender procedures and the new guidelines give practical and legal advice on how open source software and related services can be incorporated into the procurement process.

Amazing figures on the open source adoption in Finland

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I attended Openmind last week, an interesting conference organized by the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions (COSS) to bring together open source professionals, community members and academics in Finland. In the session about business aspects of open source, in which I gave a talk about FOSS Governance, Nina Helander and Mikko Rönkkö presented the preliminary results of the National Software Industry Survey 2008.

Differences between paid and volunteer FOSS contributors

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There's a lot of debate these days about the impact of the increasing number of paid developers in FOSS communities that started as volunteer efforts and still have significant numbers of volunteers. Evangelia Berdou's PhD thesis "Managing the Bazaar: Commercialization and peripheral participation in mature, community-led Free/Open source software projects" contains a contains a wealth of information and insights about this topic.

Berdou conducted interviews with members of the GNOME and KDE projects. She found that paid developers are often identified with the core developer group which is responsible for key infrastructure and often make a large number of commits. Furthermore, she suggested that the groups may have different priorities: "whereas [paid] developers focus on technical excellence, peripheral contributors are more interested in access and practical use".