On Jun 8, 2006, at 8:26 AM, Tom Welch wrote:
My name is Tom Welch. I was recently recruited by the Church to define an "open source" strategy for the Church. What does this mean? Well, for years the Church has been a heavy user of open source technology. Many of the back-end systems are all based upon open source software. In fact, the Church has contributed to certain open source projects with improvements that it has made. Because of sensitivity issues, the Church has asked the individual developers to submit changes upstream in the developers name instead of the Church's name. My role, however, is not to get the Church to use more open source software but is to figure out how we can leverage the OSS community to help build applications that the Church does not have the resources to do.
I'm excited for the Church to more fully use open source! I think open source software can help save the widow's mite for better uses, and I believe there are dozens of talented developers on this list that will be glad to put their skills to work for the Church. Congratulations on your new position, and I'm glad to see the Church taking this stance.
One thought I want to throw out is the importance of open APIs even when the code can't be open. For instance, I doubt that MIS will ever be open sourced (understandably). But as Dan Hanks has mentioned, offering an API with the same authentications and permissions as the web app would allow individual units to creatively solve problems they deal with. They could automate the populating of a calendar with birthdays, or map out their ward members' addresses, or download birthdays and phone numbers into a PDA. (All these have come up on this list.) Jonathan Schwartz had said that it doesn't matter that Java isn't open source because the APIs are open and are decided by a community process. Similarly, APIs for the ward directory, ward calendar, Boy Scouts, Young Women's, genealogy, etc. would spawn an ecosystem of development and volunteerism even if the code can't be open sourced (though that would be nice too.)
Richard --- Richard K. Miller www.richardkmiller.com _______________________________________________ Ldsoss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss
