Blogs

Some times projects fail because they picked the wrong license. The good news for those projects is that you can always change your license. (Although depending on how many outside contributions you have and whether or not you got a copyright assignment from them, this may be very simple or very time consuming.)

There's been two recent examples of relicensing in the GNOME projects. 

I attended the Open Nordic Conference in Norway in June, a conference that brought together people from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. Attending the conference allowed me to find out what's going on with FOSS in Northern Europe. What I found interesting is that there was a lot of talk about using FOSS in the public sector. A number of countries are working on repositories to exchange software, in particular for public administration.

One example is the Software Exchange (softwareborsen.dk), a project by the Danish National Software Knowledge Centre to promote the use of FOSS in Danish public administration. The Norwegian software exchange (delingsbazaren.no) plays a similar role in Norway.

When putting in place a dedicated function to carry out FOSS governance at BT we found it useful to create a manifesto, that positioned the team and it's activities within the context of the wider organisation and existing functions.

The manifesto text is below as a template, and as can be seen it is very brief. The intention here was not to specify policy or process Etc, nor to go into any of the operational details. But instead to simply outline the basic operating principles.

The team exists to facilitate the effective adoption of FOSS technology and principles across <company>. It provides a service to anyone within <company> who requires guidance in connection with FOSS matters, and draws upon a knowledge base that takes into account:

I just read an article about how schools should consider open source software. You could have replaced "schools" with "financial institutions" or "high performance technical computing" and you would be looking at any number of articles written over the past five years.

One of the reasons FOSSBazaar exists is to help those just looking to use open source to learn from those that are already using open source software. Deciding to use free and open source software, and learning how to govern it within an organization, are issues that all organizations are facing now. FOSSBazaar is the place where they can gather together to share open source governance knowledge.

Well, you have decided to enter the realm of Open Source Software (OSS), and you have heard all sorts of stories about OSS conflict with proprietary software (also known as IP software – as in Intellectual Property – or closed software) and you do have proprietary software to protect, of course.  On the one hand legal wants to make sure all angles are covered, on the other hand engineering wants to get the product out at the earliest, and lets not forget corporate IT which is questioning how OSS fits in the corporate infrastructure, and so on.