So, does your company do open source? Really? I'm not talking about using open source. I'm asking if your company takes open source philosophy to heart by walking the walk. I doubt there's any decent- sized company that doesn't use open source. But how many do open source in a business setting? Does your company *do* open source, like, within?
The transformation of open source projects into business ventures doesn’t always proceed smoothly: Witness Mandriva Linux and OpenOffice.org, to name just a couple examples. But ownCloud, which began the launch of a commercial entity in December 2011, seems to be off to a decidedly successful start, with the release of the company’s first commercial products.
Here on OStatic, we've frequently debated whether fragmentation is good for open source projects, or not so good. We've published posts arguing that centralized management of open source projects and documentation could have big benefits for users, and we've run many posts on successful forks of open source projects.
When Facebook users started getting nervous about the social networking company's privacy missteps, the open source community did what it does best -- stepped up to build a better platform based on transparency and open source tools....
With its commercial operations now focused on innovative open source software for the corporate market, Mandriva joins the OW2 Consortium to leverage its global community and outreach.
Paris July 5, 2012 – OW2, the international open source community for infrastructure software, and Mandriva, the company that gave the world one of the most popular Linux distributions, announce today that Mandriva
Opensource.com: "Building a community is core to all open source projects. In fact, an open source project that lacks a community is likely missing the point of being open source. So what happens when your open project is designed to create communities?"
Published at LXer:
Most commercial software today depends on open source software. The commercial software might be using an underlying open source platform, or it might be incorporating open source components, or it might be provided as a commercial open source product itself.
Community. This little nine-letter word is the lifeblood of open source. Barely a day goes by without some aspect of it impacting our lives, be that via Linux, a local book club, your closest group of friends or any one of a million other places. In an age when anyone over 45 seems to have stories about the end of local communities, the open source community is thriving.
Does motivation matter? Open source contributors are increasingly people who are paid to work on open source. GNOME contributor Lucas Rocha asks how this impacts communities over the long term. This is not a new question by any stretch.
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