Martin von Willebrand's blog

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Collaboration of Customers as an Open Business Model

Martin von Willebrand's picture

I'm currently managing and facilitating the Validos-collaboration – it's an open collaboration of companies for open source compliance. Validos does the basic validation of open source software packages and shares the results with every participating company/entity. Thus the basic work is done only once. I have introduced the idea and our law firm provides the compliance work. Validos is essentially a collaboration between our customers and new customers.

From our customers' perspective the business model is great. They get the traditional outsourcing benefits (expertise and scale) and most importantly, they do not need to redo work done by some other company. With a growing number of members and a growing database, the work needed per customer becomes smaller all the time. 

Collaborative Model to Validate FOSS Packages, Part 2

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I first introduced the collaborative model to validate open source packages and the benefits this offers at a Fossbazaar blog, the Part 1. This Part 2 focuses on how the collaborative model can be implemented and how it has been implemented by Validos, a Finnish association formed for this purpose:

Collaborative Model to Validate FOSS Packages, Part 1

Martin von Willebrand's picture

Working as an outside counsel, it has happened to me more than once that our firm has been asked to legally validate an open source /FOSS package that somebody else already asked us to validate.

While preparing for an open source training session destined to (corporate) lawyers in tech firms, I decided to cite one critic against open source development model: according to the critic the cost of FOSS management in companies is often overlooked and grows over time.

So, with these in mind, I realised that companies should actually co-operate in the validation effort. Instead of each company validating each component separately, this could be done together, only once. This method provides several advantages. To describe the most obvious ones: