April Roundup

A number of news items grabbed my attention this month ... for instance, I vaguely recall a story about one big tech company buying another, but the names escape me. In any case, a number of interesting open source blog postings appeared in April. Here is a sampling of posts falling in two basic categories:

Open Source as a Hobby and Business

• Connecting Hobby and Business in Open Source - How are some businesses able to harness the passion of developers for their open source hobby to create open source success? Dana Blankenhorn illustrates that it takes more than good software and a good business model to create a successful open source business.
  

• Open Source Business Strategy: About the Open Source Whole Product Concept - Roberto Galoppini explores the idea that successful commercialization of open source requires delivering a fully realized product. In my opinion, productization is the critical element differentiating an interesting project that is viewed as a fun toy from an enterprise class tool that customers are willing to pay for.

Open Source in Government

• Five Ideas to Get FOSS Into Governments - Sun's open source officer, Simon Phipps [Disclosure: I work for Sun], offer six (in spite of the blog title's reference to five) concrete ideas to speed government adoption and use of open source. Because of their size and influence (both as exemplary users of open source, and through their ability to impose procurement and usage rules), governments are important players in the open source movement. Broader government adoption of open source would be a great benefit to the industry as a whole.
  

• Participatory Legislation: the Italian Democratic Party Launches a Wiki - This blog post describes two cases of governments taking first steps towards applying open source principle to the legislative process. Specifically, the post mentions efforts in New Zealand and Italy to allow the public more direct input into writing laws. These small steps mark what I believe will result in a more participatory governing process that will ultimately lead to more accountable government.
  

• Election Industry Trade Group Issues Report Examining Open Source Voting - The Election Technology Council, a trade group US voting system vendors, recently published a report concluding that open source and proprietary software products must be treated differently for purposes of governments making decisions about voting technology citing complexity in management and lack of accountability in traditional open source projects among other things. My view is that the Election Technology Council is perpetuating the type of fear, uncertainty and doubt we typically see in industries not prepared for competition from open source vendors. While it is true that the integrity of the voting system requires certain minimum standards including security assurances, open source software can surely satisfy those needs.

Other hot topics included the importance of channel sales in growing the scope of the open source industry, and deeper discussion of the status of the emerging cloud industry , and what type of open source license is appropriate for cloud technology.