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Following up on the Optaros Free and Open Source Software Policy ~ by Stephen R. Walli
Thursday, October 27 2005 @ 11:32 PM EDT

Following up on the Optaros Free and Open Source Software Policy
~ by Stephen R. Walli
V.P. Open Source Development Strategy
Optaros
http://stephesblog.blogs.com



Back at the end of June, we published the Optaros Free and Open Source Software Policy. It was our statement of our belief of how we as a consulting services company have to engage with the free and open source community at large, and how we intend to run the business. PJ was kind enough to post the policy and some explanation on Groklaw. I was following up in a blog post to let people know we understand how to walk the walk, and that the policy wasn't simply "words on a page" so to speak. PJ asked me to write it up briefly for the Groklaw audience again.

Over the past few months:
  • We modified a key master services agreement such that a customer can release work-for-hire back to the appropriate communities. We have put in place a simple mechanism whereby we can agree with the customer and legally document areas that we can contribute code back that is part of the work-made-for-hire. As was pointed out in the comments in the original Groklaw post, customers of services companies typically own the work product. That is still very much the way the MSA reads, except we now have additional clauses in place to allow us to agree on work product to release with customer consent. We continue to work forward with enterprise customers to set up our services agreements to this end. As well as solutions faster (and cheaper) our customers are also learning the benefits of community development through us.

  • We are contributing code back in a couple of communities, notably new functionality for ActiveMQ (we have a developer that has earned a committer role on the project), and we are getting ready to submit code back to the Spring community.

  • We are building our own first community around an in-house developed application for SOX compliance auditing and litigation support (RADAR). We claimed our SourceForge site, and the code will go up in the next week. We're releasing it under the GPL. (Please join the project RSS feed if you want to know when the code arrives). This was a solutions experiment that we consider useful, want to evolve further, and saw no reason not to share out aggressively. A community may show up to participate with us or not, but locking it away would have been a waste of effort for everyone.

  • Dave Gynn has released (under the Apache license) his collection of run-time diagnostic tools which assist Java developers building Web applications, particularly using open source frameworks. He's using them inhouse developing applications for customers and thought others might find them useful as well. He's anchoring that community at http://www.wtfigo.org.

Even I've responded to a few support questions in the OpenOffice community as I get things to where I want them on my new Mac. This admittedly doesn't quite stack up to the development work listed above. It does still set the tone for our community engagement. It's a good feeling to know that no one else need necessarily go through the same learning curve or make the same mistakes I made. I've long maintained the economics of community is simple: you always get more than you give — but you have to give first. Within a day of posting one solution I received notification of a fix in a release to a much bigger problem I was having.

As the management team at Optaros, we have nothing but commitment for our participation in open source communities and collaborative development, and for the continued growth of that participation. The company was started on that premise. The policy was merely an articulation of it. The proof remains in what we do.



  


Following up on the Optaros Free and Open Source Software Policy ~ by Stephen R. Walli | 13 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Off Topic Here please
Authored by: fat_wombat on Thursday, October 27 2005 @ 11:42 PM EDT
Remember to do html links ;-)

[ Reply to This | # ]

Corrections here
Authored by: Mike Steele on Friday, October 28 2005 @ 12:34 AM EDT
So ... wazzup?

---
Mikey

[ Reply to This | # ]

Thank you for the update.
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 28 2005 @ 02:41 AM EDT

I believe Open Source and Free Software can be advantageous for everyone by
providing better quality products over the long haul, with potential economic
benefits for all parties. By contributing to an open source project, a company
is investing back into the infrastructure and cultivating a more secure future.

Unfortunately, some people view 'profit' as an evil objective, however living
wages are enabled through profit. Excessive greed and lust for power are the
real evils.

[ Reply to This | # ]

A model
Authored by: rob.hughes on Friday, October 28 2005 @ 07:39 AM EDT
I hope your policy can serve as a model for other
companies. Certainly, I'll be forwarding this to my
management. We just bought another company that, besides
their commercial version, maintains an FLOSS version of
the product, and I sincerely hope that they will follow
your model.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Always get...
Authored by: Observer on Friday, October 28 2005 @ 08:55 AM EDT
I think this is one of the best quotes I've seen here in a long time: I've long maintained the economics of community is simple: you always get more than you give — but you have to give first.

---
The Observer

[ Reply to This | # ]

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