Daddy's Other Other Project

Today the other shoe dropped, and I can talk about the OTHER project I've been working on, http://www.fossbazaar.org/ Whew! We finally kicked that thing out the door. It's all about open source software governance.

HP has put a lot of effort into figuring out how to manage our own use, adoption, integration and distribution of open source software. HP realized that this expertise was more useful to us if we shared it openly with everyone, because the ecosystem will benefit greatly from more well-informed participants, who are neither heedlessly plunging into the fray because "hey, it's free!", nor those who are too afraid of the (very real) risks to even consider the benefits of using open source software. So we released our internal toolset, FOSSology, as open source software last month. This is a set of tools that allow you to analyze any piece of software to understand what open source licenses are involved. Over time it will evolve to do even more, such as uncovering little snippets of re-used code that are copied from one place or another.

Meanwhile FOSSBazaar is a community of people working together to promote best practices in open source software use and adoption, particularly within the corporate IT world, but also across the board.

It should be fun seeing both of these initiatives grow.

FOSS = Free and Open Source Software. This is software that is developed by people from all over in an open, collaborative approach. Generally, no one company or entity controls the development of a particular project, but individuals and people from various companies and organizations work on a project together. To give you a little perspective, most of what we think of today as "the Internet" is built and maintained using open source software, such as the Apache web server that is hosting this blog right now. Other examples include the Linux operating system, and the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Nearly every service that Google and Yahoo offer is run on open source software. Increasingly, businesses around the world, in every industry, are realizing that many of the things they do now with software from a single vendor like Microsoft, Oracle, HP or IBM, can be done just as well if not better, and for far less overall investment, using competitive open source software. We've seen the financial services industry making the shift, airlines, manufacturers, the entertainment industry, governments, and yes, even big oil.