Category: 1.2 Open Source (Industry)
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Should the public sector consider open source only for new purchases? 3/4
This is the third of four questions posed to me by a journalist about open source and the public sector. The economists have an answer for this. At any point in time should you evaluate the total life-time value of the various alternatives at hand and then chose the one that has the best value.…
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Why did Munich drop Linux and LibreOffice for Microsoft Windows and Office? 2/4
This is the second of four questions posed to me by a journalist about open source and the public sector. I was not involved with the Munich decision at all, so I can only speculate and provide the usual reasons that have been reported about why such failures happen. First of all, it is nothing…
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Should The Public Sector Use Open Source Software? 1/4
I was asked several questions by a journalist about open source and the public sector. I’m answering them here in sequence. This is the first of four blog posts and the first question was: Should the public sector use open source software? The public sector and public governments should use the software that lets them…
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My top three trends for open source in 2019 (1/3)
Trend #1 that took root in 2018 and will continue in 2019 is the clean-up of the open source supply chain. According to some lawyers, there is little legally valid software left, mostly because of unclear copyright and licenses of open source code in products and components. To clean up this mess, all open source…
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How Project vs. Product Confuses Open Source Terminology
The terms project and product are used with continued confusion. Both open source and agile methods are particularly bad offenders, leading people astray. Adapted straight from the textbooks: Not always, but typically, a project is used to create a custom artifact, while a product is (by definition) made for a market, that is, many different…
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EU survey on open source software and standardization
Open source software and patents are a tricky topic and resolution of the many hairy issues may need new and/or revised laws. Fraunhofer Gesellschaft is currently running a survey for the European Union to gather broad stakeholder input on the topic. I encourage participation. Deadline is Nov 30th, 2018.