Frederic Benard

A company's decision to contribute to open source projects is usually business-driven. This article offers a review of the top reasons that can influence your company to contribute source code to open source or to start new open source projects. 1.  Provide a reference implementation to a standard: Open source is a potential venue to launch reference implementations of a specification or standard, with the added benefit that such implementations can gain faster acceptance than if they were kept proprietary. Examples of companies that launched open source projects to provide a reference implementation to a standard include: Motorola, which open sourced its high-availability middleware stack, called OpenSAF, to provide a reference implementation to the Service Availability Forum specifications. For more information on OpenSAF visit www.opensaf.org/. And Ericsson, whic... (more)

The Unofficial How-To of Open Sourcing

Open source software is shifting the software industry into a new paradigm, moving from developing proprietary code behind closed doors to developing code that can be shared, modified and redistributed openly. Key benefits associated with this shift is reducing development cost and software components complexity, developing re-usable common-off-the-shelf software assets, while increasing flexibility and using common enablers. Organizations that embrace the open source model and follow it when it influences positively their ways of building software, will increase their chances to... (more)