In the first ruling of its kind, damages were paid to an open source project who’s source code was copied and used as part of a commercial package. Read the whole story here.
Glyn Moody (from open… blog) covered the creation of a set of Panton Principles for open science data. The principles advise how scientific data should be used and shared in order for the scientific process to function effectively. I have covered open science before here. Check out Glyn’s whole post on open… here.
I know of a few people who will be graduating this year or who are currently looking for new software development jobs. Most of them are trying to find jobs that will allow them to continue contributing to open source projects during normal work hours. When I asked why this is such an important factor in the offer they accept I was told more than once that belonging to well-known open source communities really strengthens a developer’s resume, helps them build a strong global network and allows them to continually improve their development and (more importantly) leadership skills.
If the top-talent is looking for jobs that involve open source development, are the hiring companies delivering? To be honest I don’t know the answer but I can say that there are a lot more companies contributing to open source than in the past. If there is truly a demand by employees to contribute to open source projects, this could lead to a real explosion of corporate-championed open source.
What are your observations on the subject?
Today’s post asks whether an organization’s long term financial health is best served when the organization’s main focus is to increase share price each and every quarter, or if more value is generated by putting the customer their needs first.
Recent literature on the subject implies that the popular trend of the last three decades may not be the best choice – prioritizing share price above all else may actually rob longterm shareholders of wealth that could have been generated with a customer first policy. In the January-February 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Roger Martin (dean of the Rotman School of Management) took a close look at a few companies that put the customer first. Interestingly, many of these companies generated strong shareholder returns compared to the S&P 500 while creating customer loyalty (or because of it).
SpringSource recently announced a change in their open source strategy. SpringSource’s dm Server project (a Java/Spring application server) was previously monetized using the open core model in which a product’s core functionality is available as open source and a commercial version of the product is sold with a different license agreement and/or an enhanced feature set. SpringSource has decided to move to a complimentary service model in which the product is offered entirely free of charge and subscriptions for support can be purchased.
As organizations better understand their own offerings, the markets they operate in and open source itself, changes in strategy and business model can be beneficial to their ability to create value. As an acquisition of VMWare, there may be ulterior motives to this strategy switch which is counter to what has been happening in the open source word as of late. Savio Rodrigues of InfoWorld weighed in on the switch here stating that:
“It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that VMware is attempting to drive dm Server adoption through the Eclipse Foundation and monetize the adoption when operations team want to deploy dm Server applications on Cloud infrastructure. The dm Server support subscriptions are a stop gap until VMware can build out its cloud offerings and dm Server adoption increases.”
Read Savio’s whole post here.
Over the past few years, free products have been moving up the stack from tools used by technical staff such as Linux and Apache to services consumed by the general public like Youtube, Pandora and Google news. So in this era of free, on-demand access to information, media and tools how can companies who charge for their offerings compete?
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After some trouble with our previous host, a site crash and some lost backup data, I am happy to report that the site has been restored in its entirety, everything is back to normal and regular posts will commence.
