Editorial: Communications (April 2008) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Two reports issued this week provide very different numbers regarding the adoption of open source. IDC proclaims that "the economic slowdown in the United States may actually boost demand for open source services. If organizations adopt more open source software as part of a strategy to reduce software costs, the demand for related services should increase". The US-based survey reports that "almost 60% of the survey respondents said their company's spending on open source increased in 2007". This is in stark contrast to Statistics Canada's findings that "17% of private sector firms reported using open source software" and "3% of private firms and 13% of public organizations reported customizing open source software".

Editorial: Education (August 2008) - Kevin Goheen; Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The August issue of the OSBR is focused on "education". The relationship between open source software (OSS) and education is extremely broad and also very important. One could argue that OSS creation and adoption has been driven by faculty and research leaders, with eventual buy-in from the commercial sphere. This should not be a surprise; university research labs are populated with individuals possessing an abundance of creativity, a need to work with platforms for innovation, and a shortage of funding. My own lab's experience with clever graduate students and finite funding sources forced us to collaborate with the National Research Council of Canada on open source helicopters.

Editorial: Enabling Innovation (December 2008) - Dru Lavigne; Steven Muegge (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
This issue of the OSBR provides many examples of using open source principles to enable innovation. These innovations go beyond code creation and address the diverse issues of: declining computer science enrollment, a lack of affordable publishing tools for online exhibitions, the rising costs of text books, the need for process automation in developing countries, easy-to-use and accessible solutions for the not-for-profit sector, adding open source to a proprietary Fortune 500 company's business strategy, and reducing duplicated costs.

Editorial: Enterprise Readiness (May 2008) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
In January 2008, Gartner released their "Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2008 and Beyond". Their analysis around open source included the key finding that it "has become impractical for mainstream IT organizations to avoid or ignore the influence of open source across a wide variety of industry market segments. Doing so will put organizations at a serious disadvantage against competitors that are leveraging mature, stable and well-supported open-source technologies for significant return-oninvestment and total-cost-of-ownership opportunities." Does this mean that the enterprise is finally ready for open source? As Bernard Golden points out in the first article, it is impossible to answer that question when it is framed that way--there are just too many open source projects, each possessing varying degrees of maturity and usability. Bernard further posits a key point that enterprises themselves vary from early adopters to pragmatists. Fortunately, resources are available for gauging the applicability of a specific open source product to meet the needs of a particular organization.

Editorial: Health and Life Sciences (November 2008) - Dru Lavigne; Brian Barry; Peter Tanner (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The length of Wikipedia's list of open source healthcare software may come as a surprise to many readers. This issue of the OSBR provides an excellent introduction to the complexities and interoperability issues associated with healthcare software and the role open source can play in helping to resolve these issues. This month's authors also provide insight into an open source projects that follows open standards, lessons learned from providing a reference implementation, the benefits of a healthcare ecosystem, and the value of open source projects working closely with standards organizations.

Editorial: Interoperability (January 2008) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
In December, the Open Solutions Alliance published CEO Predictions 2008 which contains the responses received from their 2007 Customer Forum Series. A key finding was that the interoperability of open source with other open source and proprietary solutions was a primary concern. Several of the CEOs polled included interoperability in their answer to the question "what is the biggest challenge for the open source software industry in 2008?".

Editorial: Open Data (February 2008) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
On February 8, as the Open Source Definition and the Open Source Initiative entered their second decade, Bruce Perens published his reflections in State of Open Source Message: A New Decade for Open Source. He states his intent was to provide "another way of talking about Free Software, tailored to the ears of business people". Seeing that Gartner is predicting that "by 2011 at least 80% of commercial software will contain significant amounts of open source code", it would appear that the open source message has succeeded in reaching the ears of business people. While awareness of open source code has reached a certain level of maturity, the innovation possibilities extend beyond the code itself. As you'll see in this issue of the OSBR, awareness of open "data" is still in its infancy, resulting in many untapped opportunities.

Editorial: Procurement (March 2008) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Earlier this month, the European Commission issued a press release stating that it "will take a more pro-active approach to its own use of open source" and that "for all new development, where deployment and usage is foreseen by parties outside of the Commission Infrastructure, open source software will be the preferred development and deployment platform." While this is a strong stance regarding the use of open source, the European Commission still considers itself to be "an early adopter of open source". Canada has yet to issue such a clear cut procurement policy towards open source. It has been five years since e-cology corporation made its recommendations in its fact finding study funded by the Canadian Federal Government. The current official position is that "departments and agencies base their decisions to acquire, develop and use software (including open source software) on their business needs and the principles set out in the government's Federated Architecture Program." The Canadian Federal Government's position is wide open to interpretration and often leaves open source contractors to struggle against departments who are ignorant of and perhaps hostile to open source, and a bidding process that uses terminology which assumes a proprietary business model. Citizens are also affected, as can be seen in the example of Statistics Canada requiring the use of a particular proprietary operating system and software application in order to complete a mandatory Canadian Automated Export Declaration form.

Editorial: Security (June 2008) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
If you google the phrase "open source security", you'll find plenty of articles which debunk the "myth" of open source security, fuel the debate of Linus' law vs. security through obscurity, or argue which type of software, proprietary or open source, is more secure. Yet, the question "which type of software is more secure?" is impossible to answer. Software security is highly dependent upon many variables: the programming language used, the practices implemented by the individual programmers, the processes imposed by the specific organization overseeing the programmers, and the configuration of the software by a particular end-user. This issue of the OSBR examines several facets of open source security. Jake Kouns from the Open Security Foundation introduces an open source project which manages a global collection of vulnerabilities, available for free use by the information security community. David Maxwell from the Coverity Scan project discusses their report on code defect trends from an analysis of several hundred open source projects, representing 55 million lines of code, through 14,000 build sessions over a two year period.

Editorial: Social Innovation (September 2008) - Dru Lavigne; Tony Bailetti (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
If the overwhelming response we received to this month's call for submissions is any indication, those engaged in open source are also passionate about social innovation. We could have easily published a 100 page issue, but opted instead to save some submissions for upcoming issues as they are also suited to the themes of Building Community and Enabling Innovation. Tony Bailetti of the Talent First Network is one of the driving forces behind the OSBR. He is guest editor this month and I think you'll agree that he has done an excellent job of finding authors from industry, academia, and non-profits who are on the frontlines of social innovation in Canada. This issue is jam-packed with resources and examples of initiatives--enough to leave you thinking "I had no idea so much was happening in Canada". They aren't meant to be exhaustive, but the insights and lessons learned can be applied to similar initiatives across the globe.

The Emerging Role of Open Source in Healthcare - Brian Barry (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Healthcare has been characterized as a multi-trillion dollar cottage industry. It is highly fragmented, labour intensive, barely connected, extremely competitive, and has many different vendors and proprietary solutions. The rising cost of healthcare is straining budgets at all levels of government and imposing financial burdens on corporations and individuals alike. Against this backdrop, legitimate concerns about privacy have led to a plethora of regulations requiring complex administrative, physical and technical infrastructure to safeguard sensitive health information. Governments are attempting to impose standards and specifications from the top down to improve efficiency in healthcare delivery. These standards are broad, complex and, for the most part, lack implementations. In short, things are in a bit of a mess. A consensus is emerging around two initiatives that promise to improve the current situation. The first is to foster widespread adoption of Electronic Health Records. The second is to improve accessibility and interoperability between EHR systems. In this article, we present Open Health Tools, an open source ecosystem where members of the health and information technology professions can collaborate to build interoperable EHR systems.

Experiments, Expertise and Google Summer of Code (TM) - Leslie Hawthorn (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Computer Science seems to no longer hold sway as the career of choice among North American undergraduates. A variety of reasons for the steady decline of enrollment - down 60% in the United States since 1999 - have been explored. These include economic factors such as concerns about job security and the accompanying increase in off-shoring of information technology roles. Further, studies have noted that Computer Science as a whole simply doesn't look like much fun to today's incoming student populations. There's a general perception that Computer Science means spending one's day chained to a keyboard and monitor, scraping by as a "code monkey". In particular, students cite a lack of a social element as a major deterrent to pursuing a career in Computer Science. In this article, we examine the Google Summer of Code program, the world's first global initiative to introduce College and University students to free/libre open source software development. Over the past four years, the program has provided a model that allows College and University students to more deeply engage with the joys of computing. The experience of our participants stands in sharp contrast to the generalizations mentioned in the previous paragraph. We will discuss the origins and evolutions of the program, as well as its structure. We will also discuss how students benefit by participating in GSoC, focusing on some select success stories. Finally, we discuss how Google views this investment in the F/LOSS community and its potential to improve the overall progression of Computer Science as a discipline.

A Flat Network for the Unflat World: Open Educational Resources in Developing Countries - Steven Muegge; Monica Mora; Kamal Hassin; Andrew Pullin (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Open educational resources (OER) apply the principles of openness - particularly the freedoms of use, modification and redistribution - to digital materials for teaching, learning, and research. OER can potentially touch all areas of education, from elementary schools to higher education to professional development all over the world, but we are particularly excited about the potential to expand access to education in developing countries. That is the focus of our research and the topic of this article.

Free and Open Source Licenses in Community Life - Stefano De Paoli; Maurizio Teli; Vincenzo D'Andrea (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The objective of this article is to examine how software licenses in build and shape political and technological boundaries. We examine the cases of the Geographic Resources Analysis Support System( GRASS) geographical information system and the OpenSolaris operating system. The first project is GPL licensed software developed by a worldwide community of voluntary programmers; the second project is sponsored by a company and released under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) license.

Free and Open Source Software: Overview and Preliminary Guidelines for the Government of Canada - Robert Charpentier (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
After a slow beginning in the late 1990s, Free/Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) has been constantly growing in importance and expanding in many software architectures all over the world. This impressive growth has been supported by the numerous successes, the high-quality reputation of F/LOSS-based systems and, of course, by the expectation of cost savings. In 2003, Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) initiated a special study to determine the role of F/LOSS in our information system architectures. This study was later expanded to the whole Government of Canada (GoC). This article summarizes some key findings based on the original DRDC report published in 2004. It includes a general introduction to F/LOSS followed by some guidelines in assessing the usefulness of F/LOSS in GoC project contexts.

How is Copyright Relevant to Source Data and Source Code? - Joseph Potvin (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
One of the essentials of a healthy and democratic economy is that the rules of engagement should be understandable to people whose interests are affected by them. There are two aspects of copyright law to which all software and database professionals ought to be familiar, but usually are not. First, they should know that factual data listed in an obvious structure is not covered by copyright law, no matter how much work went into collecting it. Second, they should know that under the Canadian Copyright Act, programming code is considered to be a "literary work". This article outlines how copyright is related to source data and source code, and why this is important to both technical and business professionals in the field.

How Universities Can Enable Social Innovation - Kim Matheson (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
This article describes key conditions that enable a successful university agenda for social innovation. Integral to this success is an overarching institutional commitment to the value of social innovation so that it pervades the university's activities, ranging from the active encouragement of collaboration across the disciplines to policies regarding intellectual property. It is suggested that it is important that social innovation activities transcend disciplinary boundaries and social sectors. Finally, facilitating open access to information and resources may be foundational to achieving relevant and sustainable solutions.

Hybrid Software Boosts High Performance Computing Productivity - David Rich (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Users of high performance computing have long enjoyed the availability of both commercial and open source software (OSS). But they typically resided in separate worlds. Open source was favored by the academic and government research communities while commercial independent software vendors served the HPC needs of specific industries, such as aerospace or energy. This article examines how the wall between these two software worlds is crumbling as industry increasingly adopts more open source tools.

Implementing Open Data: The Open Data Commons Project - Jordan Hatcher (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Free and libre/open source software (F/LOSS) movements have spawned similar solutions in many other contexts, each at differing stages of development. As F/LOSS enters the routine and familiarity of middle age, the open content movement--open source for non-software copyright and best embodied by the work of Creative Commons--has just graduated university and is getting a feel for the world. Even younger is the open data movement, whose legal tools have just started to come online.

Key Elements of Social Innovation - Allyson Hewitt (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
This article describes four key elements of social innovation: i) social technology; ii) innovation intermediaries; iii) people who drive innovation; and iv) openness. By taking experiences from social technology and examining the impact of "open everything", this article posits the value of innovation intermediaries as critical enablers of success in the emergent field of social innovation.

Ladder of Participation: Business Models for Peer Production - Michel Bauwens (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Open source software is just one part of a much wider social and economic ecosystem that is evolving around increased participation of what-used-to-be consumers. New roles are emerging, including "produsers", with an intentional 's', to refer to the amalgamation of being both a user and a producer, and "end-makers", another intentional concept to be contrasted with end-users. In this new ecosystem, produsers and end-makers either partially, but sometimes fully, produce value, aided or unaided by institutions and companies. This creates new dynamics that need to be understood. One way of increasing our understanding is to look at the inter-locking dynamics of both businesses and the participant-communities, for which the following article constructs a model of Interaction. Each distinct type of relationship generates different dynamics and associated business models.

Language Insecurity - Frederic Michaud; Frederic Painchaud (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Developing reliable and secure software has become a challenging task, mainly because of the unmanageable complexity of the software systems we build today. Software flaws have many causes, but our observations show that they mostly come from two broad sources: i) design, such as a malicious or unintentional backdoor; and ii) implementation, such as a buffer overflow. To address these problems, our research group at Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) Valcartier first worked on design issues. A prototype of a UML design verifier was built. Our approach was successful, but we faced two difficulties: i) specifying interesting security properties at the design level; and ii) scalability of the verification process. Building on this experience, we studied design patterns for the implementation of security mechanisms. The output was a security design pattern catalog, available from the authors, that can help software architects choose mature and proven designs instead of constantly trying to reinvent the wheel. This paper addresses the implementation issues from our evaluation of currently available automatic source code verifiers that search for program sanity and security bugs. From this evaluation, it becomes clear that the choice of programming language to use when starting an open source project can have many important consequences on security, maintainability, reliability, speed of development, and collaboration. As a corollary, software quality is largely dependent on the adequacy of the programming language with respect to the desired properties of the system developed. Therefore, the adoption of open source software (OSS) should consider the programming language that was used.

Making Open Source Ready for the Enterprise: The Open Source Maturity Model - Bernard Golden (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
One of the questions always asked about open source is whether it's ready for the enterprise. But framing the question in that fashion blurs the issue. With over 100,000 open source products available for download at the click of a mouse, there is no blanket answer comprehensive enough to describe the entire universe of open source products. The real question facing an enterprise is whether, based upon its unique requirements, a specific open source product will satisfy its needs. Far from being a vaguely existential question, this question is extremely pragmatic, completely localized, and, as we shall see, wholly capable of being answered. This article, extracted from chapter four of "Succeeding with Open Source" presents the Open Source Maturity Model (OSMM). The OSMM is designed to enable organizations to evaluate open source products and understand whether a product can fulfill the organization's requirements.

Method for Qualification and Selection of Open Source Software - Raphaël Semeteys (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
For a company, the choice to opt for software as a component of its information system, whether this software is open source or commercial, rests on the analysis of needs and constraints and on the adequacy of the software to address these needs and constraints. However, when one plans to study the adequacy of open source software (OSS), it is necessary to have a method of qualification and selection adapted to the characteristics of this type of software and to precisely examine the constraints and risks specific to OSS. Since the open source field has a very broad scope, it is also necessary to use a qualification method that differentiates between numerous candidates to meet technical, functional and strategic requirements. This document describes the QSOS (Qualification and Selection of software Open Source) method, conceived by the technology services company Atos Origin SA to qualify, select and compare OSS in an objective, traceable and argued way. The method can be integrated within a more general process of technological watch which is not presented here. It describes a process to set up identity cards and evaluation sheets for OSS.

Mirth: Standards-Based Open Source Healthcare Interface Engine - Jacob Brauer (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The Mirth Project is an open source healthcare interface engine and interface repository created and professionally supported by WebReach. Mirth provides standards-based tools to develop, test, and deploy interoperability solutions for healthcare information systems and information exchanges. This article provides an overview of healthcare interface engines. It discusses Mirth and the healthcare and connectivity standards it supports. Lastly, the article compares Mirth to other interface engines.

The Need for F/LOSS (Governance) Operations - Andrew Back (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The case for the effective operation of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) in the enterprise has never been stronger. Yet in some quarters, the chasm between senior management's perception of the penetration of F/LOSS within their organization, and the reality, has never been wider. And when you consider that Gartner predicts that "by 2012 more than 90% of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded form", this suggests that the development of an effective F/LOSS policy will become increasingly necessary for business operations. Many enterprises, for now, are sourcing the majority of their F/LOSS solutions via a vendor. This does not remove the need for governance. Even with commercial arrangements in place, it is crucial that business have an understanding of F/LOSS communities: what drives them, how to interact with them, and what obligations they may have to them. The game has changed and innovation is no longer the reserve of software vendors with large development budgets. Software development is now enabled by open licenses that afford great freedoms and, in doing so, facilitate widespread collaboration. With this unprecedented pace of innovation, comes new obligations. We argue that the need for education around F/LOSS communities and licensing is clear.

Omeka: Open Source Web Publishing for Research, Collections and Exhibitions - Tom Scheinfeldt (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Well into the second decade of the web, many collecting institutions and aspiring digital humanists still find it difficult to mount online exhibitions and publish collections-based research because they lack either technical skills or sufficient funding to pay high priced web design vendors. The digital libraries and archives fields have produced high quality repository and collections management software, but these packages carry too much technical overhead and pay too little attention to web presentation and end user interface for most digital humanities projects. Commercial blog packages have made it easy for digital humanists to publish materials to the web, but the blog's structure of serial text posts does not allow them to present deep collections or complex narratives. That is why the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, in partnership with the Minnesota Historical Society, has created Omeka. From the Swahili word meaning "to display" or "to lay out for discussion," Omeka is a next generation web publishing platform for academic work of all kinds, one that bridges the university, library, and museum worlds through--and by helping to advance--a set of commonly recognized web and metadata standards. Omeka is free and open source. It offers low installation and maintenance costs--appealing to individual scholars and smaller cultural heritage projects and institutions that lack technical staffs and large budgets. It is standards based, extensible, and interoperable--insuring compliance with accessibility guidelines and integration with existing digital collections systems to help digital humanists of all stripes design online exhibitions more efficiently. Omeka brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to digital humanities websites, fostering the kind of user interaction and participation that are central to the mission of digital humanities, and providing the contribution mechanisms, tagging facilities, and social networking tools that audiences are coming to expect.

Open Carrier Grade Base Platform - Vijay Mahendran (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
This article introduces the SCOPE Alliance, a vertical alliance focused on accelerating the development of open standards for carrier grade base platforms, the base platforms satisfying the carrier grade requirements of the telecommunication industry. The focus of these network equipment providers is to build base platforms comprised of hardware, middleware, and an operating system using open modular building blocks to provide service solutions. Secondly, the article presents an adoption model along with the benefits, risks and factors affecting the adoption of open CGBPs by telecommunication companies. This adoption model is beneficial to top management teams and project managers who wish to improve the product development process. It also provides startups and independent software vendors a reference model to cost effectively deliver products and obtain maximum return.

Open Hardware Business Models - Edy Ferreira (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
In the September issue of the Open Source Business Resource, Patrick McNamara, president of the Open Hardware Foundation, gave a comprehensive introduction to the concept of open hardware, including some insights about the potential benefits for both companies and users. In this article, we present the topic from a different perspective, providing a classification of market offers from companies that are making money with open hardware.

Open Health Tools: Tooling for Interoperable Healthcare - Skip McGaughey; Ken Rubin (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The Open Health Tools initiative is creating an ecosystem focused on the production of software tooling that promotes the exchange of medical information across political, geographic, cultural, product, and technology lines. At its core, OHT believes that the availability of high-quality tooling that interoperates will propel the industry forward, enabling organizations and vendors to build products and systems that effectively work together. This will ?raise the interoperability bar? as a result of having tools that just work. To achieve these lofty goals, careful consideration must be made to the constituencies that will be most affected by an OHT-influenced world. This document outlines a vision of OHT?s impact to these stakeholders. It does not explain the OHT process itself or how the OHT community operates. Instead, we place emphasis on the impact of that process within the health industry. The catchphrase ?code is king? underpins this document, meaning that the manifestation of any open source community lies in the products and technology it produces.

Open Innovation 2.0 - Michael Grove (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The objective of this article is to argue for a new model that guides the efforts of multiple stakeholders to solve a problem. The new model is referred to as Open Innovation 2.0 Its main benefit is to gain competitive advantage through effective spending combined with enterprise to enterprise collaboration instead of traditional cost reduction.

Open Source and Open Standards: Working Together for Effective Software Development and Distribution - Jon Siegel; Richard Mark Soley (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Many open source projects implement open standards. We interviewed five developers who implemented different open standards in open source projects to find out how much interplay there was between implementors and standards developers and how important this communication was as they programmed the details of the specifications. Our somewhat unexpected finding was that developers preferred to work from the printed specification, separate from the standards source. When asked for a reason, most reported that resource constraints prevented them from writing code and specifications at the same time; another factor was the satisfaction that comes from working independently. Most of the developers we spoke to were more than halfway through their development before they even considered reporting specification problems to the source organization. Although this speaks well for the overall quality of computer industry specifications, it also means that feedback from open source developers is not getting back to the specification's authors.

Open Source e-Procurement Software - Dave Stephens (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
While every business needs to track the purchase of goods and services, many small and midsize businesses have been discouraged from using centralized software solutions due to high up-front licensing fees, expensive implementations, and the level of organizational training necessary to get the full value out of an enterprise-class procurement solution. This article provides an overview of the benefits provided by e-procurement solutions, then introduces the first open source e-procurement software and the business model for the company behind the open source project.

Open Source in Canada's Public Sector - Glenn McKnight; Evan Leibovitch (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The story of the growth of open source use in Canada has been far more a matter of evolution than revolution, so quiet in its pace that its progress has been difficult to measure. This has posed many challenges to Canadian open source advocates in their efforts to ensure that their country does not lag behind the rest of the world in understanding the social and business benefits open source provides. Perhaps some of the leading soldiers in the trenches might be our civil servants who protect the public purse. In addition to managing and minimizing the costs of delivering necessary services, public sector projects should also advance the social good through the delicate balance of transparency and efficiency.

Open Source Interoperability: It's More than Technology - Dominic Sartorio (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The Open Solutions Alliance is a consortium of leading commercial open source vendors, integrators and end users dedicated to the growth of open source based solutions in the enterprise. We believe Linux and other infrastructure software, such as Apache, has become mainstream, and packaged solutions represent the next great growth opportunity. However some unique challenges can temper that opportunity. These challenges include getting the word out about the maturity and enterprise-readiness of those solutions, ensuring interoperability both with each other and with other proprietary and legacy solutions, and ensuring healthy collaboration between vendors and their respective customer and developer communities.

Is Open Source Right for your Library? - Carl Grant (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
We all know that feeling in our gut, that moment when it?s time to sign the order for a new software program for your library. It's accompanied by a host of nagging questions: "Is it the right decision?" "Have we overlooked anything?" "Will this work?" "Have we considered all our options?" The decision to acquire or upgrade a library automation package is never an easy one and every director, when faced with this decision, wants to choose the best package at the best value that most fully meets the needs of users. Today, that decision is complicated by a new option, that of open source. This article will examine when and why open source software (OSS) might be appropriate for your library. It also discusses why so many libraries are moving towards OSS and some of the disadvantages that you should be aware of should you decide to move in that direction.

Open Source, Social Innovation and a New Economy of Engagement - Stephen Huddart (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Open source technologies and social innovation have emerged at a time when it is critical to adopt inclusive, creative, multi-disciplinary approaches to solving complex social and environmental problems. This article examines the relationship between open source, social innovation and engagement. It reviews four areas where their interplay has afforded organizations working in the (mainly Canadian) social sector with new tools and approaches to managing change. These tools include: i) collaboration and learning platforms; ii) social networking programs; iii) resource allocation websites; and iv) advocacy tools. An examination of two organizations leading social change in Canada suggests that to address society's larger problems, social innovators must also make use of economic incentives, facilitated or hosted conversations, and partnerships. Finally, two areas where innovation is urgently needed are identified as sustainability education and the means by which we participate in democratic processes and government decision-making.

Open Source Software for Corporate IT - Bruno von Rotz (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Of all the choices available when selecting open source software (OSS), which ones are likely to meet business and technology requirements? What tools, if any, exist to help companies assess the enterprise readiness of a proposed open source solution? This article introduces the Enterprise Open Source (EOS) Directory, a resource which was designed to help corporations accustomed to evaluating commercial closed source software find enterprise-ready open source solutions.

Open Source Software Foundations - Zhensheng Xie (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Communities that develop open source software (OSS) are virtual entities on the Internet, not legal entities. Some open source communities establish open source software foundations (OSSF) in order to protect their intellectual property and carry out contractual arrangements. As legal entities, OSSF help communities attain their long-term goals, hold community assets, provide resources to communities, and balance interests amongst different stakeholders. When OSS started to draw more business interests, commercial companies became involved with open source communities. The emergence of OSSF provides a good platform and opportunities for companies to exert their influence in a more official way. This article summarizes our recent research regarding the relationships between company involvement, governance, revenue, and OSSF.

Open Source Telecom - Jim Van Meggelen (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Open source telecom platforms have matured to the point where they are often functionally superior to more traditional products. A case in point is asterisk, an open source PBX (private branch exchange) and telephony engine, which was recently named "best IP PBX" in InfoWorld's 2008 Technology of the Year Awards. While industry recognition can be a compelling argument for adoption, it is still difficult to stake one's reputation on the implementation of any software in a mission-critical solution without having first built a solid foundation on which to do so. With the right approach, you can deliver a superior open source solution to your telecom problems, at far less cost than using proprietary offerings. Implementing an open source telecom system is similar to any development project: there are steps you can take to lower risk and ensure a successful result. This article provides a practical approach for technical implementors to build a track-record of success that will help win approval for more challenging business initiatives.

Open Source Vulnerability Database Project - Jake Kouns (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
This article introduces the Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) project which manages a global collection of computer security vulnerabilities, available for free use by the information security community. This collection contains information on known security weaknesses in operating systems, software products, protocols, hardware devices, and other infrastructure elements of information technology. The OSVDB project is intended to be the centralized global open source vulnerability collection on the Internet.

Open Sourcing Social Change: Inside the Constellation Model - Tonya Surman; Mark Surman (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The constellation model was developed by and for the Canadian Partnership for Children's Health and the Environment. The model offers an innovative approach to organizing collaborative efforts in the social mission sector and shares various elements of the open source model. It emphasizes self-organizing and concrete action within a network of partner organizations working on a common issue. Constellations are self-organizing action teams that operate within the broader strategic vision of a partnership. These constellations are outwardly focused, placing their attention on creating value for those in the external environment rather than on the partnership itself. While serious effort is invested into core partnership governance and management, most of the energy is devoted to the decision making, resources and collaborative effort required to create social value. The constellations drive and define the partnership. The constellation model emerged from a deep understanding of the power of networks and peer production. Leadership rotates fluidly amongst partners, with each partner having the freedom to head up a constellation and to participate in constellations that carry out activities that are of more peripheral interest. The Internet provided the platform, the partner network enabled the expertise to align itself, and the goal of reducing chemical exposure in children kept the energy flowing. Building on seven years of experience, this article provides an overview of the constellation model, discusses the results from the CPCHE, and identifies similarities and differences between the constellation and open source models.

Open Standards vs. Open Source: a Case of the OpenAccess Standard - Stoyan Tanev; Amy Xu; Jim Wilmore (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
In this article we provide some insights into the relationship between non-code based open assets, open development processes, and open standards. The insights are based on a case study of the OpenAccess Project of the Silicon Integration Initiative. The unique relationship between the OA standard's openness, evolution and adoption is an example of how open processes could be used to enable design tool interoperability, innovation, and cooperation.

The OpenTTT Approach - Carlo Daffara (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
There is no shortage of data and results that demonstrate that open source software, when adopted with appropriate best practices, can significantly lower costs and provide quality IT (information technology) solutions, especially for small and medium enterprises. For example, the Consortium for Open Source Software in Public Administration project demonstrated that by using best practices for OSS procurement, not only was software acquisition cheaper, but the evaluation of tangible and intangible costs over 5 years demonstrated a cost reduction ranging from 20% to 60%. The EU study on the impact of OSS indicates that OSS can reduce software research and development costs by 36%, while the INES project found that companies adopting OSS increased profits and reduced time to market and development costs in 80% of the trials. If OSS is so advantageous, why is so little use of it perceived in the marketplace, especially among SMEs? We present the preliminary results of an European project called OpenTTT to improve the adoption rate and study the effectiveness of best practices in OSS adoption within small and medium enterprises.

OSS Spending Trends in Education - Justin Davidson (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Open source software (OSS) is becoming more prominent within the education market as more educational institutions turn towards open source as a solution that meets their needs. However, open source is not appropriate for all, and institutions should be cautious about implementing OSS. When adopting open source, institutions should ensure it is a strategic decision and not just a philosophical one. At Datamonitor, a provider of online data, analytic and forecasting platforms for key vertical sectors, we believe that the role of OSS will become increasingly important in education. The solutions available are becoming more sophisticated and stable. Currently, 56% of education institutions are using OSS and open source is clearly making headway into the education market. Furthermore, there are a number of varying factors driving institutions towards OSS and not all institutions are implementing OSS for the same reason. OSS offers an alternative method through which an institution can implement a technological solution, along with it's own variety of benefits and pitfalls. However, the increased popularity of OSS will not prevent proprietary software solutions from having an important role to play in education. Instead, OSS and proprietary solutions are going to become even more entwined together and the line between open source and proprietary solutions will blur.

A Panamanian Initiative to Embrace the Future - Monica Mora (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The International Center for Technological Development and Open Source Software (CIDETYS) in Panama is a non-profit organization, promoted by the Panamanian government to harness the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and open source software (OSS) to create social benefits for its population. An important goal of the center is to collaborate with international organizations and become a leader in Central America in the development, use and implementation of ICT and OSS. This article describes the main activities that CIDETYS will be focusing on during the first years of operations, how this initiative was born, and a story of the implementation of OSS in the region of Extremadura, Spain that inspired the creation of CIDETYS.

The Personal Research Portal - Ismael Peña-López (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Digital technologies have forever changed the way that knowledge is disseminated and accessed. Yet, the main problem knowledge workers face is invisibility: if people don't know that you know, and people are not aware of what you know, you do not exist. Governments and institutions are being pushed to foster Open Access (OA) literature as a way to achieve universal reach of research diffusion at inexpensive and immediate levels. Most efforts have been made at the institutional level, dedicating little energy to what the individual can do to contribute. The philosophy and tools around web 2.0 bring clear opportunities for individuals to contribute and to build a broader personal presence on the Internet and a better diffusion for their work, interests or publications. We propose the concept of the personal research portal (PRP) as a means to create a digital identity for knowledge workers--tied to one's digital public notebook and personal repository--and a virtual network of colleagues working in the same field. Complementary to formal publishing or taking part in offline meetings, the PRP would be a knowledge management system that would enhance reading, storing, and creation at both the private and public levels, and contribute to create an online identity that, in turn, will help to create a network whose currency is knowledge.

Power of Openness to Solve Textbook Access Problems - David Wiley (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Article 26 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights attests that access to educational opportunity is a basic human right. Yet while a myriad of publishing technologies flourish around us, the staple of classroom teaching, the textbook, is becoming so expensive as to be increasingly inaccessible. In this article we describe how Flat World Knowledge is leveraging principles of openness to bring textbooks back into reach of all students, creating significant social value in a manner that will sustain itself over the long-term.

Project Conifer - Art Rhyno (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Sharing resources lies at the heart of librarianship, and libraries have a long history of collaborative projects and initiatives. It comes as no surprise then to find that libraries have a natural synergy with open source software and there have been some recent activities where open source solutions have been applied to large scale services. This article describes a project between several Ontario university libraries to work together on a mission critical OSS application for their campuses.

Q&A. Besides compliance, are there any business reasons for maintaining an accessible website? - Glenn McKnight (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Your questions answered and reader feedback.

Q&A. Does lack of product management impact the users of open source? - Paul Young (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Most commercial software companies employ product managers to handle the planning and marketing of software products, whereas few open source projects have a product manager. Does lack of product management impact the users of open source?

Q&A. Does the Google Summer of Code project provide any value to open source projects and the students who participate? - Murray Stokely (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Google recently announced their fourth Summer of Code. Does the Summer of Code project provide any value to open source projects and the students who participate?

Q&A. Why use OSS, other than the licensing cost of the software? - Alan Morewood (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Your questions answered and reader feedback.

Reducing Global Poverty and Disease with Community and Technology: An Open Source Perspective - Cliff Schmidt (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Literacy Bridge, a non-profit technology startup, is using open source software (OSS), open hardware, and open content to solve some of the world's most challenging problems: global poverty and disease. Through the development and application of a digital audio device, Literacy Bridge's Talking Book Project is designed to make access to information available and affordable to those who have the fewest resources but the greatest need. This article summarizes the Talking Book Project and describes how six aspects of successful open source projects are being applied to improve global literacy and access to information. Most importantly, this project demonstrates the power of combining community and appropriate technology to change the world.

Security Hardening of Open Source Software - Robert Charpentier; Mourad Debbabi (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
In today's computing world, security takes an increasingly predominant role. The industry is facing challenges in public confidence at the discovery of vulnerabilities and customers are expecting security to be delivered out of the box, even on programs that were not designed with security in mind. Software maintainers must face the challenge to improve the security of their programs and are often under-equipped to do so. Some are taking advantage of open source software (OSS) for their production systems as the availability of the source code facilitates their validation and answers their need for trustworthy programs. OSS are often implemented using the C programming language (26% according to SourceForge.net), making it is necessary to investigate the security issues related to C. This paper summarizes key concepts related to security hardening, and demonstrates its applicability on the C language. We also propose a progressive approach to integrate security services and protection measures into existing software to ultimately make it more resistant against cyber-attacks. Given our ever increasing dependability on information technologies, it becomes critically important to provide tools to maintainers that will facilitate and accelerate the security hardening process, increasing the effectiveness of the effort and lowering the resources required to do so.

Sharing Information on the Semantic Web: The Reminiscence of an Old Legal Issue - Pierre-Paul Lemyre (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The success story of open source software (OSS) makes us see very clearly that in a networked world, centralized production of information is not the only viable model. It is now largely understood that distributed production can often equal and surpass it, both in quality and quantity. This has led people in all disciplines to rethink their relationship with information, giving birth to a plethora of initiatives generating value by promoting the mass collaboration of individuals over shared sets of information. Based on rich Internet applications, wikis, social tagging or social networking technologies, these initiatives gave birth to a revolution that has been dubbed Web 2.0. Whether they originate in non-profit or business ventures, they all add up to the ever increasing mass of accessible and reusable information. For current information hubs that have been developed through independent channels, it is anticipated that the next step in the evolution of the web will make seamless integration possible. This development should create tremendous opportunities for those capable of building innovative services and knowledge products on top of this shared knowledge base. In fact, along with the technological foundations of this web of ideas, practical commercial implementations are already starting to appear. However, these early experiments highlight the fact that the most important challenge to overcome might not reside in the technology itself. Instead, the management of rights may, more than anything else, hinder the efficient aggregation of distributed information.

Social Innovation: Access and Leadership - Roseann O'Reilly Runte (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
We live in an age where the rapid pace of technological innovation and the ability to disseminate knowledge far exceed our capacity to ensure that all members of society receive their benefits. The challenges in providing access to technology have been largely solved in this globally connected world. How to best use that technology to increase social value and alleviate lack of education, poverty, and other societal problems is an ongoing question with no easy answers. This article explores the challenges for social innovation and the use of information technology. These challenges are: i) access to technology; ii) access to learning; iii) the use of technology in teaching and research; and iv) the establishment of a framework of knowledge.

Social Innovation in Sub-Saharan Africa - Steven Muegge; Chukwuemeka Afigbo (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
SW Global is an African-based application service provider of information technology infrastructure and software. This article describes how SW Global, a for-profit private sector company, creates high-impact value at universities and governments in developing countries through an innovative business model anchored around service subscriptions, open source software, and open content.

Software Accessibility: Where Are We Today? - Marco Zehe (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
While it seems intuitive that applications, especially open source ones, should allow all to use and enjoy them, many developers are unaware of the need for accessible applications. Providing accessibility in information technology is not difficult, but it does require a basic understanding of different types of disabilities, commonly used assistive technologies, and the special accessibility features built into languages and standards. Most of all, accessibility requires a conscious effort and a desire to include everyone. The accessibility of computer software has seen drastic improvements over the past two decades. This article reviews this progress, examining the technologies developed and offering guidelines for developers to create accessible applications.

TIM Lecture Series: A Practitioners Guide to Ecosystem Development - Mike Milinkovich (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
On September 3, 2008, Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, delivered a presentation entitled "A Practitioners Guide to Ecosystem Development". This lecture introduced the fundamental concepts of ecosystems and how the Eclipse Foundation matches the theory. This report provides the key messages from the lecture.

TIM Lecture Series: Building Technical Communities - Ian Skerrett (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
On June 4, 2008, Ian Skerrett from the Eclipse Foundation delivered a presentation entitled " Building Technical Communities". This section provides the key messages from Ian's lecture. Ian used his observations of working in the Eclipse community to explain why community building is important, its critical elements, and how the traditional roles within an organization relate.

TIM Lecture Series: Ecosystem Approach to the Commercialization of Technology Products and Services - Tony Bailetti (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
On March 28, 2008, Tony Bailetti, Director of Ontario's Talent First Network, launched Carleton University's TIM Lecture Series with a presentation entitled Ecosystem Approach to the Commercialization of Technology Products and Services. The TIM Lecture Series provides a forum to promote the transfer of knowledge from university research to technology company executives and entrepreneurs as well as research and development (R&D) personnel. This conference report presents the key messages and insights from the three sections discussed during the inaugural presentation.

TIM Lecture Series: OSGi and Server-Side Eclipse - Dwight Deugo (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
On August 27, 2008, Dwight Deugo from Carleton University delivered a presentation entitled "OSGi and Server-Side Eclipse". This lecture introduced the fundamental concepts of OSGi, a component integration platform to provide interoperability of applications and services. It also discussed how the Equinox project has incorporated OSGi into the Eclipse platform and gave an overview of the impact it has had on Server-Side Eclipse. This report provides the key messages from the lecture.

TIM Lecture Series: Privacy and Security in a Connected World - Douglas King (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
On May 7, 2008, Douglas G. King, Assistant Professor of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University, delivered a presentation entitled "Privacy and Security in a Connected World". The TIM Lecture Series provides a forum to promote the transfer of knowledge from university research to technology company executives and entrepreneurs as well as research and development personnel. This conference report presents the key messages and insights from the three sections discussed during Professor Kunz's presentation.

TIM Lecture Series: The State of Open Source Software and Corporate Software - Doug Levin (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
On April 16, Doug Levin, CEO of Black Duck Software, gave a presentation entitled The State of Open Source Software and Corporate Software Development. This conference report presents the key messages and insights from the three sections discussed during the presentation.

TIM Lecture Series: Trends in Technology Marketing - Stoyan Tanev (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
On May 23, 2008, Stoyan Tanev from Carleton University delivered a presentation entitled "Trends in Technology Marketing". This section provides the key messages from Dr. Tanev's lecture. Tanev's lecture discussed current trends in technology innovation and marketing by focusing on the evolution of traditional marketing concepts.

TIM Lecture Series: Wireless Sensor Networks: What and Why? - Thomas Kunz (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
On April 30, 2008, Thomas Kunz, Director of the Talent Innovation Management (TIM) program at Carleton University delivered a presentation entitled "Wireless Sensor Networks: What and Why?". The TIM Lecture Series provides a forum to promote the transfer of knowledge from university research to technology company executives and entrepreneurs as well as research and development personnel. This conference report presents the key messages and insights from the three sections discussed during Professor Kunz's presentation.

TIM Series: Open APIs, Mashups and User Innovation - Michael Weiss (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
On June 11, 2008, Michael Weiss from Carleton University delivered a presentation entitled "Open APIs, Mashups and User Innovation". This section provides the key messages from the lecture. Michael's lecture examined the structure of the mashup ecosystem as well as implementation issues, including licensing.

TIM Series: Practicing Safe Software: Good Software Record - Mahshad Koohgoli (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
On June 18, 2008, Mahshad Koohgoli, CEO of Protecode, delivered a presentation entitled "Practicing Safe Software: Good Software Record". This section provides the key messages from the lecture. Mashad's lecture discussed the drivers behind establishing software IP (intellectual property) pedigree as well as the preventive and corrective methods of detecting and managing external IP in a project.

TIM Series: Theory, Evidence and the Pragmatic Manager - Steven Muegge (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
On July 2, 2008, Steven Muegge from Carleton University delivered a presentation entitled "Theory, Evidence and the Pragmatic Manager". This section provides the key messages from the lecture. The scope of this lecture spanned several topics, including management decision making, forecasting and its limitations, the psychology of expertise, and the management of innovation.

Treasury of the iCommons: Reflections of a Commons Sourcing Lawyer - Thomas Prowse (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
This article advances the thesis that commons sourcing is the emerging third wave of commercial transformation. It begins with the iCommons concept and its origin in open source software (OSS) methodologies and emergence in other business models. It then defines commons sourcing and situates it with respect to the two earlier waves of commercial transformation. It concludes with some reflections by a commons sourcing lawyer.

Uses of Creative Commons Licenses - Minjeong Kim (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
A recent study examined the uses of Creative Commons (CC) licenses and their potential to resolve the conflict surrounding copyright law in the digital communications era. This article summarizes the major findings of that study, originally published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Why Give Knowledge Away for Free? The Case for Open Educational Resources - Jan Hylén (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
An apparently extraordinary trend is emerging. Although learning resources are often considered as key intellectual property in a competitive higher education world, more institutions and individuals are sharing digital learning resources openly and without cost, as open educational resources (OER). The issues of why this is happening, who is involved, and the important implications were addressed in a 2006 study carried out by the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation with the support of the Hewlett Foundation. The main conclusions are summarised here, together with some insights from a follow-up, and not yet published, study from spring 2008. Higher education is facing a number of challenges: globalisation, an aging society, growing competition between higher educational institutions both nationally and internationally, and rapid technological development. OER is itself one of these challenges, but may also be a sound strategy for individual institutions to meet them. The trend towards sharing software programmes through open source software and research outcomes through open access publishing is already so strong that it is generally thought of as a movement. It is now complemented by the trend towards sharing learning resources: the OER movement. OER are a fascinating technological development and, potentially, a major educational tool. They accelerate the blurring of formal and informal learning, and of educational and broader cultural activities. They raise basic philosophical issues dealing with the nature of ownership, the validation of knowledge, and concepts such as altruism and collective goods. They reach into issues of property and its distribution across the globe. They offer the prospect of a radically new approach to the sharing of knowledge, at a time when effective use of knowledge is seen as the key to economic success, for both individuals and nations. OER projects can expand access to learning for everyone, but most of all, for non-traditional groups of students. They thus widen participation in higher education. They can be an efficient way of promoting lifelong learning, both for individuals and for government, and can bridge the gap between non-formal, informal, and formal learning.

Adding Value to Information Systems Using Free Data - Ervin Ruci (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
This article provides an example of how a graduate student in Ontario used open source software and freely available data to solve a technical dilemma, start and grow a business, and provide services which benefit many. It also illustrates how easily new features and customizations can be developed when an API is made available to its users.

Building an Open Source Company One Penguin at a Time - Bill White (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Roaring Penguin Software Inc. started as a one-person consulting company in 1999. A year later, David F. Skoll, the company's President and CTO, was asked to develop an e-mail filtering tool. David developed MIMEDefang, an e-mail filter that used Sendmail's Milter facilities. David donated the code to the open source community, and kept developing MIMEDefang as a free tool for system administrators. Today, the MIMEDefang code is available at at the website. By 2002, it was obvious that there was a need for a packaged mail-filtering solution suitable for end-users. David decided to go ahead and write what became CanIt-PRO. Whereas MIMEDefang is suited to system administrators who are familiar with Perl and comfortable with writing their filtering policies in Perl, the CanIt product line allows end-users to control their filtering through a simple web-based interface. The company transformed itself from a consulting company to a product development company. This transformation required significant changes.

Company Interactions with Open Platforms - Tammy Yuan (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
The telecommunications industry is moving away from building communications and data service networks using proprietary platforms of specialized hardware, closed interfaces, and proprietary technologies. Increasingly, the industry is assembling new networks on open platforms comprised of both commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software and open source components. Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) stands at the center of the move to open architectures. This article addresses three questions. 1) What motivates companies to incorporate CGL specifications into their products? 2) How do companies adopting CGL create and appropriate value? 3) What roles do these companies play in the ecosystem anchored around the CGL Working Group initiative? These questions are of interest to top management teams facing pivotal decisions of whether or not to incorporate open platforms into their products, and how to compete in a world where those same platforms are available to competitors.

Comparing the BSD and GPL Licenses - Bruce Montague (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
There are many reasons, not all necessarily altruistic, for the popularity of Open Source Software (OSS). This article provides an overview of software and licensing, and suggests usage examples for two well-known open source licenses: the GPL and BSD license. This article does not discuss recent GPLv3 developments and reflects my own experiences, not necessarily those of my employer.

Competitive Actions of Open Source Firms - Glen McInnis (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Early in 2006, Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer made a public statement that Microsoft had no trouble competing with open source rivals on features. Balmer was downplaying the fact that Open Source Software (OSS) has changed the nature of competition in the software industry from one of feature-based competition to a much more complex model for competition. Traditional firms like Microsoft are not simply competing against a loose group of programmers who produce OSS; they are competing against other firms who have chosen to use OSS as part of their product or service offering. This article is an examination of competition in this new environment where firm-to-firm competition includes those firms making use of OSS. The evolution of the marketplace becomes evident when competition is viewed as a series of small, but discrete actions that are carried out by a firm. Each of these actions is intended to improve the firm's standing in the marketplace. Such actions can be classified as one of six different types of competitive action: (i) pricing, (ii) marketing, (iii) new products, (iv) capacity, (v) service, and (vi) signaling.

Competitive Open Source - Peter Carbone (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Peter Carbone describes insights gained from a joint industry-university research project.

Conference Report: Open Education 2007 - Andrew Pullin; Kamal Hassin; Monica Mora (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Open Education Resources (OER) are educational material and resources that the general public can freely use for teaching, learning, and research. Like Open Source Software (OSS), OER contain content that is freely reused and redistributed without the traditional restrictions imposed by copyright. OER also includes the tools used to develop, improve, and distribute this content to communities. The Open Education 2007: Localizing and Learning conference was held at Utah State University in September. The conference focused on the ability of people to learn as simply publishing OER content online does not guarantee that it can be effectively used for learning. This theme was investigated from two perspectives. The first was from the developer perspective with the sharing of efforts to localize the educational content and make it more relevant to the people using it. The second was from the user perspective where organizations utilizing or deploying OER spoke of their experiences, challenges, and successes. This report provides an overview of the sustainability, localization, technological, legal and interoperability issues raised at the conference. It concludes with the authors' views regarding the future direction of OERs, based on their research being conducted at Carleton University's Technology Innovation Management program.

Defining Open Source - Russ Nelson (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
The Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation share a common goal: that everyone should be free to modify and redistribute the software they commonly use. 'Should' is of course a normative word. For the FSF, 'should' is a moral imperative. Anything else is an immoral restriction on people's activities, just as are restrictions on speech, press, movement, and religion. For the OSI, freedom is a necessary precondition for a world where "software doesn't suck", in the words of a founder of the OSI. The FSF started from its founder's GNU Manifesto widely published in 1985. Given the manifesto's hostility to copyright, and given the failure of the Free Software Foundation to gain any traction amongst commercial users of software even with a 13-year head start, a group of people gathered together in 1998 to talk about a new strategy to get the corporate world to listen to hackers. They were impressed by Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar's take-up among business leaders.

Eclipse: A Premier Open Source Community - Donald Smith; Mike Milinkovich (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Donald Smith and Mike Milinkovich examine the factors that grew the Eclipse community into a thriving ecosystem.

Editorial: Business Models (August 2007) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
At the close of the 20th century, Tim O'Reilly wrote The Ten Myths About Open Source Software: Do any of these still sound familiar? 1. It's all about Linux versus Windows 2. Open source software isn't reliable or supported 3. Big companies don't use open source software 4. Open source is hostile to intellectual property 5. Open source is all about licenses 6. If I give away my software to the open source community, thousands of developers will suddenly start working for me for nothing 7. Open source only matters to programmers; most users never look under the hood anyway 8. There's no money to be made on free software 9. The open source movement isn't sustainable; people will stop developing free software once they see others making lots of money from their efforts 10. Open source is playing catch up to Microsoft and the commercial world

Editorial: Clean Intellectual Property (December 2007) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
As 2007 draws to a close, three emerging trends are gaining momentum. The first is that companies are releasing formerly proprietary code under an open source license. The second is that open source companies are being acquired or are issuing public offerings. The third trend is that very large number of citizens increasingly uses the Internet to oppose politicians and law makers who threaten, sometimes unwittingly, the fundamental principles of open source development. These three trends tie into this month's editorial theme: Clean intellectual property or clean IP. In a nutshell, clean IP is about reducing license incompatibilities and non-compliance with licensing terms. Clean IP significantly affects the value of the code released as open source and the value of a company that develops and markets software.

Editorial: Defining Open Source (September 2007) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
In his book Foresight and Understanding: An Inquiry into the Aims of Science, Stephen Toulmin wrote "Definitions are like belts. The shorter they are, the more elastic they need to be. A short belt reveals nothing about its wearer: by stretching, it can be made to fit almost anybody." Keep in mind the nature of elasticity while reading through this issue of the OSBR. The theme this month is "Defining Open Source"; however, you'll find that the articles build upon and extend both the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition. This stretching in order to fit almost anybody is bound to make the open source purist uncomfortable; it is our intent to provoke thought and we look forward to receiving and publishing reader feedback.

Editorial: Introducing the OSBR (July 2007) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Welcome from the Editor.

Editorial: Licensing (October 2007) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
In his book Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law, Lawrence Rosen defines licensing as "the legal way a copyright and patent owner grants permission to others to use his intellectual property". When you consider that the bread and butter of a company usually revolves around its intellectual property, it's not suprising that open source licenses are often regarded with suspicion. How is it possible for a company's interests to be protected by a license written by another party? And how can a company provide "open" access to its intellectual property without "giving away the store"? Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer for Sun Microsystems, once stated in an interview: "While open source licensing lets people have access...this doesn't have to mean that chaos ensues." This issue of the OSBR provides insights to help navigate the chaos that is often associated with open source licenses.

Editorial: Support (November 2007) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
What is your first thought when you encounter the term "open source support"? A programmer typing the answer to a question using a chat utility? Hours spent scouring the Internet for a working configuration sample? Contacting a support engineer at a commercial call centre? If you find it difficult to think about a support engineer, you're not alone. Actuate's recently published 2007 Open Source Survey of senior personnel from financial services, Telco, and public sector organizations across North America and Europe indicates that 46.3% of respondents cite the lack of availability of long term support as a major barrier to their company's adoption of open source technologies.

Ensuring Software IP Cleanliness - Richard Mayer; Mahshad Koohgoli (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
At many points in the life of a software enterprise, determination of intellectual property (IP) cleanliness becomes critical. The value of an enterprise that develops and sells software may depend on how clean the software is from the IP perspective. This article examines various methods of ensuring software IP cleanliness and discusses some of the benefits and shortcomings of current solutions.

Ensuring the Quality of Open Source Software - David Maxwell (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Open Source Software (OSS) has been embraced by individuals for decades, but only recently have organizations around the globe looked upon open source as an attractive and practical alternative to proprietary software. In addition to its appealing price tag, usually free, OSS can be inspected, modified, and freely redistributed according to the terms of its license. In spite of this, open source developers still find their code quality and security challenged by a question that has followed them from the beginning: "If it's free, how good can it be?"

Enterprise Open Source Support - Stormy Peters (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Open Source Software (OSS) has permeated the enterprise. Some organizations still prohibit the use of OSS altogether, but they are unquestionably in the minority. For most companies, it's not a question of "should we use OSS"? but rather, "how and where can we best take advantage of open source solutions"? As companies have shifted from prohibiting OSS use to embracing it, they must now deal with technical support issues. This article examines the various option available to support companies that use OSS.

Evolution of an Open Source Strategy - Kelly Rankin; Ronald Baecker (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
On June 8th, 2005, we officially launched the ePresence (http://epresence.tv/) Interactive Media Open Source Consortium, at the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI), University of Toronto (UofT). We had been researching and developing ePresence, our webcasting, webconferencing, and archiving software project for about five years. Throughout the early phase of the project we used the system to produce live webcasts of KMDI's annual lecture series. Eventually word spread about our webcasting system and other universities, such as Memorial University in Newfoundland, became interested. It was obvious that the time to share our project with the world had come, but what wasn't obvious to us at the time was how we were going to do that.

Five Stage Approach to Licensing - Thomas Prowse (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
This article will set out a practical five stage approach to Open Source Software (OSS) legal issues for organizations that are working, or thinking of working, in this area. While OSS affords a plethora of legal challenges and ongoing developments that merit treatment, I will focus on a general framework for managing OSS legal issues. Since I will provide general legal information and not legal advice, I strongly encourage your organization to work with legal counsel with competency in the OSS area to address its specific circumstances.

Free as in Adjective, Not as in Verb - Amos Hayes (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Open source provides an avenue for distributing academic research well beyond the covers of journals or the lunchtime chatter of sharp-minded thinkers to a much broader audience. Interestingly, the choice of open source license is often a choice of community. By understanding the goals and underlying philosophy of a research project, one is better equipped to find a suitable license and attract a community with similar interests. This article provides an examination of a particular academic research project's licensing goals and presents some of the lessons learned during the license selection process.

Improving Application Development by Managing Licensing Issues - Doug Levin (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Over the past ten years, the Internet and open source software (OSS) have enabled developers to fundamentally change the way they produce software. Increasingly, distributed teams are collaborating to assemble software from reusable components and their own proprietary code rather than building applications entirely from scratch. The component-based development model is fundamentally changing the software industry. It enables organizations that develop software, either for commercial sale or for in-house use, to accelerate project timelines, improve software quality, and reduce development costs. If not managed properly, the complexity inherent in this new world of mixed-IP (Intellectual Property) can pose business and technical risks to an organization. This paper draws on the experiences of the Black Duck Software team, our customers, and other industry experts to propose new approaches to managing IP in this new world. It describes a set of best practices that companies can use to avoid the risks and gain the benefits of the component-based approach to software development.

An Introduction to Rights Expression Languages - G.R. Gangadharan; Michael Weiss (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
The objective of this article is to: i) extend the discussion of licensing to non-software assets and ii) provide an introduction to rights expression languages (RELs). Licensing is not limited to software. We can associate a license with any kind of asset that holds intellectual value, and can thus be turned into a source of revenue. Here, our interest is on information assets, which include software and software components, but also services, processes, and content. For instance, a song that a user downloads from iTunes is an information asset. So is a web service such as the Google Maps API (application programming interface).

Key Changes to the GNU General Public License - Eric Smith (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
On June 29, 2007, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) issued the GNU General Public License Version 3. The issuance of GPLv3 marked the end of a remarkable public consultation process aimed at revamping the license to address issues that the FSF considers to be a threat to the Free Software movement, and to clarify issues that have been misunderstood or debated since the publications of GPL Version 2 (GPLv2). This article introduces the rationale for changing the GPL and introduces the changes that affect patents, Digital Rights Management (DRM), license compatibility, and the linking issue.

Keystone Organization for Ontario's Open Source Ecosystem - Rowland Few (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Many companies, individuals and organizations in Ontario produce and use open source assets and processes to provide unique value to their customers, clients, and themselves. To better enable these companies, individuals and organizations to (i) co-evolve capabilities and roles, (ii) align themselves with companies holding leadership roles, and (iii) invest in shared visions, the Talent First Network (TFN) has become the keystone organization of Ontario's open source ecosystem. This article introduces the TFN and identifies the steps it is taking to better support the Ontario Open Source Ecosystem.

Lead Projects - Peter Hoddinott; Richard Alam (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Corporate Directory Platform and the Ottawa Tech Community described.

Ontario Research Commercialization Program - Brad DeFoe; Dmitri Prokopiev (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Brad DeFoe and Dmitri Prokopiev describe the Ontario Research Commercialization Program.

Open Educational Resources - Monica Mora (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
This article first introduces open content and open educational resources (OER), then compares OER and open source software (OSS), and finally discusses issues of OER project sustainability.

Open Hardware - Patrick McNamara (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
I have been involved in a number of debates on what exactly constitutes open hardware. While the definition is a bit harder to pin down than that of open source software, I believe hardware can be loosely placed into four categories of openness. They are, in order of least to most open: Closed, Open Interface, Open Design, and Open Implementation.

Open Source as Community - Nelson Ko (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
What does it really mean to participate in an open source software community? If a company's open source strategy is limited to acting as end user of open source software, is there a business need to understand the nature of open source communities? Should it be the goal of all businesses to become an active participant in open source communities, or become recognized as a significant contributor? Business users of open source software can broadly be divided into those who use open source software as end-users, and those who incorporate underlying open source technology into their products and services. This article will first address both these groups with the important facets of understanding and evaluating community in the selection of open source software, and then elaborate on the role of active participation in open source communities to enhance the value that can be obtained from the use of open source. It is based upon lessons I've learned from becoming progressively involved in a particular open source software community, Tikiwiki, and comparisons with other open source communities which I've made to identify commonalities and differences.

Open Source Assets - Tony Bailetti; Peter Hoddinott (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
The Open Source Definition or OSD defines the criteria to which the distribution terms of software must comply for it to be deemed to be open source software. The term open source, however, is used to label a broad assortment of phenomena that fall well outside the established OSD. In addition, there is ambiguity in what is meant to be covered by the terms source and open. We envisage a definition of open source that equally applies to software, hardware schematics, content, and processes, not just software.

Open Source Licensing in the Enterprise - Stormy Peters (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Studies show that most open source projects are licensed under the General Public License (GPL) and it is estimated that over 75% of open source projects are licensed under either the GPL or the LGPL (Lesser GPL). Yet, it has been my company's experience that the open source software used by our enterprise customers is primarily Apache licensed software. This article examines several factors which may shed some light on this disparity, including the issues raised by enterprise customers and the software product selection process used by OpenLogic (http://www.openlogic.com).

Open Source on Trial - Kamal Hassin (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
The way we develop software is continuously evolving: the everyday processes and practices used to produce software are becoming more efficient, and it is common for a team of developers to change several times over the life of a software project and for the components used to come from a variety of sources. However, the benefits of these changes cannot be fully appreciated unless correct policies and strategies are used to capture value from innovation. This is where the worlds of technology and Intellectual Property (IP) law collide and where license compliance is fundamental in protecting a company's IP and avoiding legal conflicts.

Open Source Telecommunication Companies - Peter Liu (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Little is known about companies whose core business is selling telecommunications products that lever open source projects. Open source telecommunications (OST) companies operate in markets that are very different from typical software product markets. The telecommunications market is regulated, vertically integrated, and proprietary designs and special chips are widely used. For a telecommunications product to be useful, it must interact with both access network products and core network products. Due to specifications in Service Agreements Levels, penalties for failures of telecommunications products are very high. This article shares information that is not widely known, including a list of OST companies and the open source projects on which they depend, the size and diversity of venture capital investment in OST companies, the nature of the commercial product-open source software and company-project relationships, ways in which OST companies make money, benefits and risks of OST companies, and competition between OST companies. Analysis of this information provides insights into the ways in which companies can build business models around open source software. These findings will be of interest to entrepreneurs, top management teams of incumbent companies that sell telecommunications products, and those who care about Ontario's ability to compete globally.

Protecting Information Technology Property Rights - Russell McOrmond (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
New copyright legislation is on its way from the Canadian government, and may have been tabled by the time you are reading this. While we won't know exactly what is in the bill until it is tabled in the House of Commons for first reading, the Government has made many statements indicating that it intends to ratify the highly controversial 1996 WIPO treaties. I believe it is important for open source developers and users to be aware of how some of the proposed changes may affect open source in Canada.

Putting Maps on the Web with Open Source Technologies - Dave McIlhagga (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
In this time of excitement over the emergence of mapping technologies like Google Earth, Personal Navigation Devices, GPS technologies for tracking vehicles, and so much more, a little known phenomenon has also been taking place: the explosive growth of open source mapping technologies. Leading the way in this area is DM Solutions Group (DMSG) - a small company based in Ottawa, Canada who is working closely with customers and partners from around the world to incorporate mapping into their web environments. Web Mapping is a highly specialized niche market that can be applied to almost every conceivable industry. It is this peculiar combination that is at the heart of why the open source software development approach has been so successful in this area.

Q&A. How one can develop a business model around open source? - Peter Hoddinott (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
How can one develop a business model around open source if the resource is freely available?

Q&A. What effect do supply and a demand have on open source commercialization? - Ian Graham (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
I've read that commercialization has both a supply and a demand side. What effect do these two sides have on open source commercialization, specifically in Canada?

Q&A. What is the state of open source in public administration? - Christian Meloche; Luc Lalande (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
What is the state of open source in public administration?

QNX Hybrid Software Model - Lawrence Rosen (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
QNX Software Systems' new software model integrates open source and proprietary software products in new ways. It is a step forward in the embedded systems market toward openness and freedom of software development, and it gives QNX customers significantly greater flexibility to extend and adapt QNX technology for their own purposes. The new QNX model is an effort to address fundamental problems in the way proprietary embedded software is traditionally developed and distributed. Today, the rate of change to software and hardware is so rapid, and software so complex, that vendors and customers alike struggle to keep up. Often, software vendors are their own worst bottleneck, as they work to fix or extend their existing products while also attempting to satisfy new, and often divergent, customer needs. Meanwhile, the sophisticated users and customers in the embedded market often know exactly what features and functions they want; many would make the modifications themselves if allowed to do so. And many of them would welcome opportunities to cooperate and share the results of their collective development efforts, just as they would in an open source project. A pure open source approach doesn't work in all cases, and it doesn't work for QNX which does not believe that relinquishing all control over their intellectual property and giving it away for free would best serve the interests of their customers.

A Rallying Moment for Canadian Open Source Software - Andy Kaplan-Myrth (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
In the Canadian copyright reform arena, the events of early December, 2007 changed everything. In late November, it was widely anticipated that new copyright legislation would be introduced in the model of the controversial American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The bill was rumored to include harsh anti-circumvention laws, which grant software distributors the right to seek legal remedies for circumvention of technological locks on content. In response, veteran Canadian copyright advocates issued an appeal to Canadians to take an interest in the bill and to call for fair and balanced copyright. Canadian citizens answered that call in unexpected numbers, both online and offline. A Facebook group, called Fair Copyright for Canadians, grew to over 25,000 members within two weeks, and provided grassroots advocacy tools to citizens. A new website, called CopyrightforCanadians.ca, established itself as a centre for news on the bill and consumer advocacy. Using these tools, Canadians wrote letters, met with politicians, and demanded balance. With their words and their actions, not only did Canadians delay the introduction of the bill until next year, but they put copyright in the spotlight and showed legislators that fair and balanced copyright can capture the public imagination.

Software Licensing - G.R. Gangadharan (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
G.R. Gangadharan discusses the many dimensions of software.

Special Considerations for Financial Services Firms - Sourcelabs (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Infrastructure Open Source Software (OSS), including middleware, database packages, and the Linux operating system, is increasingly being deployed by financial institutions. Many OSS packages are selected and incorporated directly into custom applications by developers, thus bypassing traditional purchasing channels and their attendant legal, standards, and technical review processes. Because of this, Information Technology (IT) management is often unaware of the OSS running in their data centers, and sometimes support and maintenance measures are not in place for OSS running in production applications. With the advent of regulatory structures such as the Basel II accords, the reliability of computing systems is increasingly subject to regulatory scrutiny. Not having adequate support and maintenance measures in place creates a significant compliance risk for financial institutions. This article describes these risks and outlines best practices for an anti-failure program that brings systems depending on OSS packages into compliance while reducing overall operational risk.

Supporting Not-for-Profits: an Opportunity for the Commons - Jason Côté; Julian Egelstaff (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
In 2004, the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI) released "Choosing and Using Free and Open Source Software: A Primer for Nonprofits". The primer describes the potential impact that Free/Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) might have on the not-for-profit (NFP) sector. In a recently released update, the primer concludes that, despite many advances in the use of F/LOSS in the sector over the past several years, a real and perceived lack of support remains a significant barrier to the increased adoption of F/LOSS by NFPs. Support is often the last thing people think of when they think of F/LOSS and NFPs. Instead, people tend to focus on the price, which is of particular importance to cash-strapped NFPs. There is a widely held belief that free software represents a cost savings to NFPs.

TFN: Open Source and Innovation - Tony Bailetti (Open Source Business Resource, 2007)
Tonay Bailetti explains the goals and progress of the Talent First Network Program.