Open Source Delivers

It seems that open source stories have been all over the web this week. While some projects are turning one year old, others are just being born. The U.S. government has its own Linux distribution, developers are getting kudos on social networks and the open source influence within mobile operating systems continues to grow. Here [...]

I’m often asked: “How should I manage open source at my company?”  The short answer I usually give (besides “You should manage it well!”) is that the management of open source should be holistic and systemic in the day-to-day cross-functional operations of your company.   In fact, this is the only real way to address all [...]

Most of what’s written on open source has to do with some big controversy, or the Great Game of large companies colliding in court or the marketplace. This is not one of those stories. Instead, it’s about the comforting feeling of normal business being done. It’s about an open source “portal” software company called Liferay [...]

More likely than not, you, just like many of us at Black Duck, are focusing your efforts around the quality of the code written by your engineers, which is great… but it is not enough! Static code analysis has long been a well-recognized best practice in software engineering organizations. For us, reduced bug rates and [...]

Linux data points are plentiful these days, especially as we celebrate its 20th anniversary year.  With this in mind, we challenged ourselves to think about what data Black Duck’s Knowledgebase (KB) of 500,000 + projects might contain that would be interesting for the casual observer and Linux stalwart alike.  It reminds me of trying to [...]

As most of you know, there were two important open source industry events that took place in Paris, France this week. The week started off with the Open Source Think Tank Paris and is concluding with the Open World Forum (OWF). Hundreds of open source experts with different roles and backgrounds (decision makers, communities, developers, [...]

SAP began its journey into the open source ecosystem more than ten years ago with the support of Linux as a reliable OS alternative and the selective use of mature open source products in our technology platform. Over the years, our engagement in open source projects was significantly increased. We are a major contributor to [...]

One of the reasons developers like using open source is they have free reign to search the half million plus projects on the Internet, find code they can use, integrate it, etc.  But while developers enjoy the freedom and creativity of such autonomy, IT organizations have multiple goals regarding OS management, some of which are [...]

Using open source technology has represented a significant change in how we operate at AOL.  We’ve had to clean up older legacy code to release it and make it more attractive to the external open source community. And I’m happy to say that this process has really started to energize parts of our organization. Open [...]

The importance of FOSS to the entire software industry is readily apparent to even the most casual observer. But using FOSS effectively in a company’s products requires much more than casual participation in the community that supports particular FOSS packages. Adopting FOSS carries with it the obligation to learn how the support community operates, and [...]