Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
Dana,
I agree open source is a way to do more with less - and it's great to see that enterprise developers are looking at the benefits and seeking ways to participate.
The CodePlex Foundation (www.codeplex.org), which is a repository for open source IP, (not for code like forges) - is working to help establish models of collaboration that will make it easier for corporations to join the OSS ecosystem. Web Forms MVP and our other projects are just the beginning.
Regards,
Paula Hunter
Executive Director
CodePlex Foundation
www.codeplex.org
Black Duck Software has released a small survey of top global enterprise developers, which sees open source meeting a continuing squeeze to do more with less.
If these guys are ready to defect, saying the costs of proprietary-only development are unsustainable in the face of falling budgets and increased demands, even Baghdad Bob couldn’t spin a proprietary victory.
While the numbers surveyed were minuscule, 20 executives from 14 companies, these were all top people from major organizations, the proprietary model’s dead enders.
But, Black Duck vice president Jim Berets noted in a press release, barriers remain, and the answer these leaders see may be right in Microsoft’s wheelhouse. “Most of these barriers can be traced to the lack of an enterprise-wide open source strategy and clear policies and procedures for managing its use.”
That’s where Codeplex, the open source repository founded by Microsoft but now run by an independent foundation (that’s the foundation logo at the top), comes into the picture.
Codeplex is all about policies and procedures. When Codeplex adds a new project like Web Forms .ASP into its gallery, it’s fully vetted, with policies and procedures in place these kinds of developer organizations understand in their guts.
What the developers need to do is also important, and there the answer is conventional. They seek the clouds, they need virtualization, they’re being asked to support mobile.
Codeplex will not answer all those concerns, but the efforts of people like Sam Ramji to establish rules for corporate contributions to cloud software projects are not misplaced, according to the results of this survey.
