I attended a meeting of the Harmony project in Boston today. Preliminary reaction follows...

Companies have been concerned about software license compliance with respect to free and open source software for some time. Part of this is due to simple competitive FUD designed to frighten people away from using FOSS or to sell services and tools around it, and part of this was due to genuine concern with license compliance when lawsuits appear because of violations. The Linux Foundation announced the Open Compliance Program at LinuxCon in Boston today to help companies understand and manage such compliance needs.

The issue isn't really one of FOSS usage. The Internet made collaborative software development and software publication easy. Software from proprietary sources with ambiguous licenses (e.g. MSDN, the Oracle developer network) can enter the software development chain as easily as FOSS. As Jim Zemlin pointed out in his blog announcing the program:...

MVC Contrib is the first project donated to the CodePlex Foundation by an independent group of developers.  The following interview about the project is with Eric Hexter, co-leader of the project.  Read it here or follow the link to a podcast of this interview.

The past few weeks have seen a resurgence in the debate over whether or not open core is a valid open source business model or not. There has been a lot of passionate and pragmatic discourse from lots of knowledgeable people (Phipps, Ingo, Mickos, Aker, Aslett, Proffitt, O'Grady).

I believe part of the confusion is between the FOSS projects with their attendant communities, and products in the market that incorporate...

And the band played on ....

The debates rage again. The initial thrust of the discussion started with Simon Phipps blog editorial about his view of the failings of the open core open source business model, following on his call for a renaissance of the Open Source Initiative. The debate broadened with posts from people that have lived in the space (Henrik Ingo and Brian Aker responding to Marten Mickos) and continues with excellent commentary from Matt Aslett...

It was brought to my attention that the FSF has re-posted its CodePlex Foundation commentary from last Fall on the day it was announced that I took the position as technical director at the Foundation. I'm not sure that anything has been added to the new commentary. Re-reading the FSF re-post, I can't but point back to my original response. I will add a couple of clarifications.

I saw from Dana Blankenhorn's blog post the other day that the Eclipse Foundation has once again published its excellent annual survey of Eclipse usage in the world. This is an annual survey that is always interesting because it shows the rise of many free and open source software projects beyond the Eclipse world and their subsequent competition with each other and the traditional products in the marketplace (e.g. Windows, Oracle). There were 1696 completed surveys this year to last year's 1365, i.e. there were almost 25% more respondents this year.

Dana caught sight of a trend noted by Ian Skerrett in his blog post announcing the survey:

Trend #7. Open source participation seems to be stalled....

 

Speaking with Stephen O’Grady of RedMonk the other day, it became clear that we are still far away from a perfect understanding of the value of open source, particularly for non-software companies which often consume open source but do not always contribute back to the community.

I am pleased to welcome Stephen Walli to the CodePlex team.   If you are an open source veteran, you have likely met him.    Stephen and I met at OSBC this year, and he already had a very good understanding of our mission and some constructive suggestions for us.      

Stephen will take an active role with the gallery managers to ensure that we are helping them achieve their goals.   In addition, Stephen will engage with the project leaders to determine what programs or services they need from us to sustain their projects throughout their lifecycle.   It is also time to start capturing and sharing best practices, we will have more to say about that in upcoming weeks.

I am sure Stephen will welcome your input, in the mean time, Welcome Stephen!

 

We have just added a new project to the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery. The Web Forms MVP project supports test-driven development for ASP.NET applications. If you are a web developer, or are involved in technical decisions regarding your web platform, you may want to pay attention to this project.

How did this project come about? The origin of this project resides “down under” in Australia. Seems two colleagues, Damian Edwards and Tatham Oddie were the original brains of this project, which has gone through a number of revisions. This project has matured to a point where it is now bundled with DotNetNuke 5.3+, integrated with EPiServer, and is powering large production web sites. Damian recently took a job with Microsoft, and Tatham agreed to take on the role of project coordinator. If you are...