Blogs

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".

A few years ago, a group of us in HP observed the following trends in the directory services marketplace:

This afternoon, I have made a demo of fossology in FOSS working group of SYSTEMATIC PARIS-REGION cluster

SYSTEM@TIC PARIS-REGION seeks to boost the economy and employment through innovation, training and partnerships. The researchers, industries, training organisations and local governments involved with the Cluster have three priorities:

• consolidate the major integrators' leadership in order to secure the sustainability of their R&D activities in the Paris Region

Since last January, I'm an active user of Fossology. Performing source code license analysis, I was surprised by the large number of open source projects combining ASL and GPL v2 components. Those two licenses are known to be incompatible because of patent license termination, and we can wonder if most open source projects get concerned by licence compatibility issue.

In “real life” study, the only license reference of a component was found on the sourceforge summary page without any other copyright or license notice in source code and release. And for another component of the same software, we found 4 notices of different licence in documentation, sourceforge page, project home page and source code ...

Definitely, tools like Fossoloy are opening a new field within open source communities around trust in license notice, and compatibility issues.

Open Source introduces new ways of working with software companies. Customers aren't limited to making binary "buy vs build" decisions with proprietary companies. They can now make much more granular decisions about where and how to buy, build, and integrate.

There are three main models for interacting with companies that provide commercial services around open source software: Corporate, Intermediary and Facilitator. These services can include support, consulting, outsourcing/hosting, training and other services.