Blogs

This is an overview of TiddlyGuv, an open-source governance application under development at Osmosoft, the open source innovation arm of BT. TiddlyGuv helps enterprises manage their open-source activities, and TiddlyGuv itself is an open-source, BSD-licensed, framework available for anyone to adopt and tailor to their needs. A basic working version of TiddlyGuv is already present right now, with full source available, but there is a lot of extra functionality still being planned.

Having been involved with Open Source Software (OSS) in companies large and small, one of many issues that arise is the importance of establishing guidelines to assist with and promote the use of OSS both internally and in product development as well as conforming with the many different licensing requirements that may at times even appear to be contradictory and conflicting amongst different OSS products.

Also keep in mind that some OSS snippets have a long track history as to their origin and may appear in different OSS code bases.  these tracks are not easily identified without the use of a sophisticated (and usually expensive) software auditing tool.

And not all companies can afford a costly code analyzer.  Some companies are not even aware that such monitoring tools even exists.

Full Story at Wazi

I just complete an analysis of 779 open source projects in the health care segment.  Ten years ago, when the American Association of Family Physicians attempted to organize an open source EMR (electronic medical records) project, it never quite achieved the necessary momentum.  Out of all the open source projects in the health care space, there were only 62 project releases in the year 2001.  The open source community has come a long way since then – there were 565 releases in 2008.  There are about 30 projects dealing specifically with EMR/EHR and some of them are very large – having 100+ contributors.

For more info, please see the press release: http://www.blackducksoftware.com/news/releases/2009-06-10

Here’s the podcast: http://ducks.blackducksoftware.com/~webmedia/_Podcasts/BDS_Eran_Strod_6_...

Someone recently asked me a few question about corporate participation in open source communities and I thought I'd share my thoughts on this topic here.

Are there differences between an open source project done for a corporation and one done for personal reasons?

There are many different ways to run an open source project, led by a corporation or by someone else. Some projects that are run by corporations have few outside contributors. This is often the case with projects that require copyright assignment (i.e. contributors have to assign their copyright to the corporation). These projects may not gain all the benefits of a true open source community, such as outside contributions or high levels of peer review. However, they may still be very successful projects and may have high levels of quality.