Tag Archives: Governance

How Can Open Source Become User-Centric?

Including design and UX in a true community project is a challenging matter of balance because of the motivational model behind open source projects.

Mexican Hat rock

According to The Cathedral and the Bazaar, the key motivation for participants in open source projects is “scratching their own itch.” One consequence of this is co-ordination of contributions to support user-centric design is inherently an optional extra in a true open source project with multiple independent participants.  We all wish there was a way to get genuine user experience quality as a key dynamic of open source projects. But there are two big reasons that is challenging. Continue reading →

Large-Scale Governance – 10 Apache Lessons

Starting a large-scale open source project? The Apache Software Foundation is the benchmark against which you will be measured.

Santa Cruz surfer

We’re now well beyond the point where open source has “won”. We’re seeing the open source idea starting to mature beyond even adolescence into adulthood. As it does so, our understanding and expectations of open source communities need to expand. Continue reading →

Six Pathologies of Organisational Maturity

Maturing, successful organisations have recurrent, emergent patterns of failure that can sometimes be predicted and perhaps avoided.

Tree trunk absorbs spear tips of the fence next to it

Everything has a season, and as organisations age – communities, charities, companies, churches and more – they face similar diseases of time. These are emergent patterns of failure that arise not from mistakes but from the consequences of earlier success. In open source, we are seeing the same patterns emerge; this should not be a surprise. Continue reading →

The Cost Of Open Sourcing Your Project

Accusing a company of “dumping” their project as open source is probably misplaced – it’s an expensive business no-one would do frivolously.

swan-m

If you see an active move to change software licensing or governance, it’s likely someone is paying for it and thus could justify the expense to an executive. Continue reading →

SAP’s open source journey continues

The stand of German IT superpower SAP might have seemed like a surprising addition to this years OSCON. Announcing its sponsorship of both Cloud Foundry and the OpenStack Foundation, the firm is committed to adding support for its SAP HANA in-memory database to both platforms. In addition, SAP was also promoting its own open source project OpenUI5, a substantial JavaScript UI library it previously delivered as a proprietary project under the name SAPUI5.

In previous articles, Simon has explored the idea of a seven stage model of open source adoption by large corporations. SAP’s latest moves to embrace open source more fully demonstrate its progression into the middle stages of the ladder. Whilst there’s still a long way to go, this progression is a welcome development. Read Simon’s full article on InfoWorld.