In the first article in this series, "Is open source a development model, business model, or something else?" I introduced the concept that open source is part of the supply chain for software products. But to truly understand open source as a supply chain, you must have a decent understanding of what a product is. A product can be thought of as a business, and as legendary business guru Peter Drucker said, "The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer." Drucker's statement means a business or product must be useful enough to pay for, or it will fail. Product differentiation is the thing that creates and retains customers.
open source projects
See the following -
How to Decide Whether to Open Source Your SaaS Solution
By John Mark Walker | September 7, 2018
Should a SaaS provider open source its primary platform, and if so, what is the best way to do it? The decision to open source code requires a fair bit of planning if you want to do it right, especially when it comes to user support and documentation. In the case of SaaS, the required planning is different, although it shares some factors with any open source effort. In my series, How to Make Money from Open Source Platforms, I focused on software that exists solely to be deployed on a computer, whether on a local machine, in a data center, or in a cloud platform (yes, I know the last two are redundant).
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How To Define A Product In The Open Source Software Supply Chain
By Scott McCarty | October 27, 2020
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Imaging And Radiology Paves The Way For Industry Adoption Of Open Source
Gorkem Sevinc | OpenSource.com | February 24, 2014
Open source software in healthcare has been instrumental for sharing common tools and increasing adoption of emerging medical information technology (IT) standards. By leading the effort to digitize health data, imaging informatics has set the precedent for the adoption of the technology industry's best practices and subsequently open source software. Read More »
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Improve Open Source Community Sustainability By Tracking These Two Metrics
By Kevin Xu | November 12, 2020
In early 2020, I wrote an article on three metrics for tracking and measuring offline, in-person community-building activities. Little did I (or the world) know then that offline, in-person activities of any kind would soon become unfeasible for the foreseeable future. So, I started thinking: With open source projects being online by default, and with everything else moving online and virtual, what should creators of open source technologies measure as we continue in this COVID and (hopefully soon) post-COVID world? There are plenty of metrics you can track—stars, forks, pull requests (PRs), merge requests (MRs), contributor counts, etc.—but more data doesn't necessarily mean clearer insights. I've previously shared my skepticism about the value of these surface-level metrics, especially when assessing an open source project's health and sustainability. In this article, I propose two second-order metrics to track, measure, and continually optimize to build a strong, self-sustaining open source community...
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InnerSource: a practical application of open source techniques within organizational boundaries
By Andy Oram | September 10, 2015
Using open source methods within your own company--without offering up your resulting source code to the public--is called InnerSource. A report I wrote for O'Reilly Media titled Getting Started with InnerSource lays out some of the benefits of the open source model and how one company, PayPal, is carrying out both open source projects and InnerSource. Why would you want InnerSource? According to the report, your organization can grow and become more productive in several ways...
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Interview With Free Software Foundation Executive Director Zoë Kooyman
By Seth Kenlon | July 8, 2022
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) started promoting the idea of sharing code way back in 1985, and since then it's defended the rights of computer users and developers. The FSF says that the terms "open" and "closed" are not effective words when classifying software, and instead considers programs either freedom-respecting ("free" or "libre") or freedom-trampling ("non-free" or "proprietary"). Whatever terminology you use, the imperative is that computers must belong, part and parcel, to the users, and not to the corporations that owns the software the computers run. This is why the GNU Project, and the Linux kernel, Freedesktop.org, and so many other open source projects are so important.
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Is Facebook The World's Largest Open Source Company?
Matt Asay | ReadWrite | October 17, 2013
Red Hat used to wear the open source crown. Then Google. But Facebook and other web giants now contribute the most to open source. Read More »
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Is Open Source A Development Model, Business Model, Or Something Else?
By Scott McCarty | October 16, 2020
The OSD gives a clear definition of what open source software is, but doesn't provide much insight into how the adoption of open source affects a company's ability to build and deliver products or services that people want and need. Stated another way, there's still tremendous debate about the best ways to build a business based on open source. In this first of a multi-part series, I will lay the groundwork for understanding what products are, what product managers do, and how open source can be considered a supply chain. In future articles, I will go deeper into each of these topics, but I'll start by dissecting some common, but fundamentally confusing vocabulary.
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Is Open Source The Key To Innovation?
Harish Pillay | ZD Net | August 6, 2014
...That is the question that open source initiatives are seeking to answer as they aim to forever change how we businesses think about technology and collaboration. Without open source, many of today’s top technology initiatives – from cloud computing to big data and mobile – would simply not exist as we know them...
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It's Time To Pay The Maintainers
By Donald Fischer | October 15, 2019
Earlier this year, Tidelift conducted a survey of over 1,200 professional software developers and open source maintainers. We found that 83% of professional software development teams would be willing to pay for better maintenance, security, and licensing assurances around the open source projects they use. Meanwhile, the same survey found that the majority of open source maintainers receive no external funding for their work, and thus struggle to find the time to maintain their open source projects. So, to put what we learned succinctly...It's time to pay the maintainers. Not just because they deserve to be compensated for their amazing work creating the software infrastructure our society relies on (they do!). But also because there is a ready-made market of professional developers willing to pay for assurances they are in the best position to provide. Here's an idea for how to do it...
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Kitware Is looking For Developers And Project Leaders In North Carolina (USA)
Noeska Smit | medvis.org | October 12, 2012
Kitware (of open-source software such as ITK, VTK, Slicer and CMake fame) is currently looking for Developers and Project Leaders for their office in North Carolina. Read More »
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LibreHealth
LibreHealth is an independent self-governing free & open source software community founded by leading members of the OpenMRS & OpenEMR projects. It builds on a decade of dedication and hard work by contributors to those earlier projects and was created to expand the communities’ impact to all types of Health IT, leveraging its values of active user engagement & radically open transparency. Participation in the LibreHealth community is open to all individuals who support our core values and contribute to our activities.
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Linux Foundation Launches Public Health Initiative to Respond to COVID-19 and Future Pandemics with Open Source Solutions
Press Release |
Linux Foundation Public Health |
July 20, 2020
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today launched a new initiative to use open source technologies to help public health authorities (PHAs) around the world combat COVID-19 and future epidemics. The new Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) initiative is launching with seven Premier members - Cisco, doc.ai, Geometer, IBM, NearForm, Tencent, and VMware - and two hosted exposure notifications projects, COVID Shield and COVID Green, which are currently being deployed in Canada, Ireland, and several U.S. states.
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Microsoft Might Finally Be Committing To Open Source
Nikhil Sonnad | Quartz | July 23, 2014
Microsoft is known for keeping its programming secrets to itself. But under CEO Satya Nadella, the maker of proprietary behemoths like Windows and Microsoft Office is starting to show up in the world of open-source software, whose code is public for anyone to see, borrow from and tinker with...
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Mozilla Announces Second Set of COVID-19 Solutions Fund Recipients
Press Release |
Mozilla |
June 8, 2020
Innovations spanning food supplies, medical records and PPE manufacture were today included in the final three awards made by Mozilla from its COVID-19 Solutions Fund. The Fund was established at the end of March by the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS), to offer up to $50,000 each to open source technology projects responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. In just two months, the Fund received 163 applicants from 30 countries and is now closed to new applications.
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