Category: 1. Software Industry
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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 (3/3)
The most important long-term trend, and my number #3 for the foreseeable future, is the sponsorship and management of open source software development by users, not vendors. The trend towards ubiquitous digitization is leading users of software to take their software fate into their own hands, establishing informal communities or incorporating as non-profit user consortia…
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My top three trends for open source in 2019 (2/3)
Trend #2 for 2019 in my book is making single-vendor open source, also known as the open core model a.k.a. neo-proprietary open source, work in the world of cloud computing. In this model, a software vendor goes to market using an intellectual property strategy that combines open sourcing of the product with an aggressive copyleft…
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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…