"RECOMMENDATION ON THE OPENNESS OF THE CODE AND
INTERFACES OF STATE INFORMATION SYSTEMS"
It is short, pragmatic and was published by the Ministry of Finance, Finland.
Taken from it:
1. About FLOSS(*) developers (in page 14):
"Their age is primarily between 20 and 30 years and more than half of them have university degrees. Especially those in charge of the projects usually have quite extensive professional experience. Their motive is to improve their own reputation, and many use this to improve their position in the labor market. According to the study, one third of them is paid by the employer to do the programming work."
(*) FLOSS meaning: Free/Libre Open Source Software
2. About FLOSS projects (in page 14):
"The publication of the source code and making it freely accessible does not always awaken the public to work around a project, even though it might be interesting in principle. Netscape made the source code of its browser accessible to the open community under the name Mozilla. For several years the project was quiet and there was hardly any development. At present the development work has started."
"The problem with the Mozilla project was that the original code was confusing and badly documented and that it formed one large entity, which could not easily be chopped into partial entities. Likewise, the project lacked interim goals and a development plan. It was impossible for open source programmers to get involved in the project. The fact that a project is interesting does not alone arouse interest in the
community. Good project management is also necessary."
3. About buying and specifying of software by *state agencies* (in page 14):
"In the experience of agencies, the buying and specifying of software poses a challenge. The agency does not necessarily understand the program entity. What is a great problem in administration is that numerous agencies lack a clear data-technology architecture. If they have this architecture, they procure their software from different suppliers, and compatibility with the existing architecture is either not considered a necessity or the ability of the suppliers to provide solutions compatible with the architecture forms an obstacle to a compatible choice."
Does any of this look familiar to any of you? If I am not wrong it will qualify to the "must read" status.
The paper is freely available from: http://www.vm.fi/tiedostot/pdf/en/65051.pdf
J. Antas
