Lots of really good discussion on this thread.
Measures are a good thing, but need to be focused around WIIFM: "What Is
In It For Me", where "Me" can be a number of different groups:
Eg:
1. Shareholders
2. Individual customers like government departments
3. The Customer community (all the users of geographic software)
4. The General Public
5. The open source software development community
6. The proprietary software development community
7. ...
We all fit into one of more of the above groups and will have a vested
interest in the value gained by each of these communities.
So when decisions are made, they will need to be weighed up against the
value gained by each of these communities.
I see value to decision makers and those of us aiming to influence
decision makers if there is a checklist of value questions (and answers
where possible) for all the key stakeholders.
Eg: I'm personally an open source software developer and want to benefit
the open source community by open sourcing my companies code. I need
some convincing arguments (from a shareholders point of view) to
influence my manager's decision.
Landon Blake wrote:
I’ve been thinking about writing a short article on the involvement of
corporations in the open source world. Specifically, I want to
describe a system or set of rules for measuring the quality of a
company’s involvement in an open source community. In other words, I
want to provide some measuring sticks that can help developers and
managers answer the question “What type of citizen is this company in
the open source community?”.
I think these guidelines can help developers and users that want to
evaluate the merit of companies that claim to follow the open source
or FOSS idealogy. I think it is very possible for a company to release
code under an open source license, but at the same time to be lousy
members of the open source community.
I’ve already got some of the measuring sticks in mind. Has anyone done
work on this topic before? Would you like to share with me what
measures you use to gauge the “worthiness” of a company involved in
open source development?
I think this will become a more important subject as open source
software development becomes more mainstream and more companies become
involved. I think it will also be important to separate the corporate
leeches from those that really give back to the open source community.
Perhaps a standard rating system will evolve from the article, if one
does not exist already.
Thanks for your thoughts.
The Sunburned Surveyor
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Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://lisasoft.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254
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