andrew's blog

For a year now we've had a dedicated F/OSS governance team in place at BT: the "Open Source Operations Team". In naming the group we opted for "operations" over "governance", as we saw the role of the group as being to foster adoption and increase understanding, in addition to that which is generally associated with governance. Also, we were keen to ensure that we were not seen as simply the company's "open source police", and for some, unfortunately, governance translates to restriction and red tape.

As we work to clear the obstacles to enterprise adoption of FOSS, we tend to focus our efforts on aspects such as support, licensing, and surfacing the economic and other wider benefits. However, it is becoming clear that this alone is not always enough, and that there are still pieces of the jigsaw missing...

Proprietary software benefits from an advertising budget, and teams of people whose sole purpose is to communicate the benefits of the technology to potential customers, and along with this how it will fit into their enterprise. Now, it must be said that I'm no fan of advertising, I like to consider myself largely immune to it and I believe that it will increasingly become of less importance. However, when you assume the position of a "customer" - in particular a non-technical one - and compare the proprietary software and FOSS landscapes, the latter can appear much more confusing, and whilst if you buy into advertising, dare I say also, amateur.

Making bold predictions is a great way to be proved wrong. Whilst those who do so and with any reasonable success tend to be in positions of power else wise old hands with an acturial knowledge of their domain. Since I fall into neither category I'll proceed with some intrepidation...

I'm not sure how many times I've heard people state that Linux is ready for the desktop. But each time this has been said I've also heard a number people counter the claim. If it's not with the complaint that it's too difficult to configure, that it lacks hardware support or certain productivity tools. Whilst such things have now been largely addressed more recent gripes seem to be around overall user experience, and beyond which the fact that from a fresh install it rarely, if ever, looks as shiny and polished as some operating systems do.

A question that frequently comes up when talking with those who are new to FOSS is, "But how can I be sure as to the quality of the code?" And I would suggest that the answer to which, as with proprietary software, is largely the application of common sense. Due diligence in the form of seeking out case studies, soliciting the experiences of peers and the collation of other empirical evidence. Nothing new or difficult here.

It may be that a vendor features in the equation, and in which case they should be able to provide some level of assurance also. However, the absence of a vendor should not dissuade you from doing what you would have done previously. But you must also consider the ability of your organisation, or its contracted support provider, to maintain the code.

A few months ago the US Court of Appeals upheld the Artistic License as legally valid, and in doing so strengthened the position of other FOSS licenses. Prior to which the GPL has been upheld a number of times in German courts, thanks to chiefly the efforts of Harald Welte and Till Jaeger.