stormy's blog

This is a repost of a blog entry from Stormy's Corner.

Most people used to the proprietary software world, with no experience in open source software, are amazed that anything gets done. (And lots gets done in the open source, way more than in most proprietary software companies!) And people new to open source are usually at a loss as to where to start. Often they come with a great idea, tell a couple of people who confirm it's a great idea, and then ... well, and then they don't know what to do and the great idea fades.

So here are some of my ideas on how to get things done in the open source world. And I am by no means the expert - I'm in awe of some of the people I work with on a daily basis.

To get things done in open source:

FSF Europe has come out with a good report on what to do about open source license violations. They cover:

• how to report a license violation,
• how to respond to a license violation notice,
• and how to avoid license violations.

Their advice for reporting a violation is very specific and detailed - worth reading. They cover things from what information you want to include in the report to where to send it.

The information on how to avoid license violations is not as detailed - it basically says to read the license and get help from experts. If you are interested in avoiding licenses, you'd be better off reading information on open source compliance programs.

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 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.

I recently wrote about how open source software policies evolve. Yesterday I read another model about how open source software usage evolves in a company. Bernard Golden's O'Reilly Open Source in the Enterprise Report contains five pages on how to create an open source action plan and his first step is to decide if your company is early in their adoption of open source (90%), mainstream (10%) or an advanced user (<1%).

Early adopters are people still using open source software under the radar. Early adopters should focus on figuring out what they are using, setting up a govenrance process and learning community skills.