Once More unto the Breach

Optaros Open Source Directory Relaunched Online

Optaros has relaunched its Executive Open Source Directory as an online resource.  Originally launched in January 2007 as a PDF document on their white papers site, the directory covered approximately 260 free and open source software projects.  The valuations were based on hands-on experience from the Optaros developers and consultants and rated the projects from the perspective of functionality, maturity, community activity, and overall from an enterprise readiness point of view based. 

Optaros is now relaunching the directory as an online interactive resource.  They hope it will be more consistently up-to-date, and they're enabling external ratings, and case studies to be uploaded so customers and communities can directly participate.  Optaros will maintain ultimate editorial control to ensure quality.  RSS feeds are enabled to allow people to track projects or the directory at large. 

I took the opportunity to interview Bruno von Rotz, VP Strategy & Research and country manager in Switzerland, about the development of the directory and have presented it as a podcast.  I also interviewed Daniel Chalef, CEO at Knowledge Tree, an open source document management system company with a project in the directory since the original directory was created.  I finish up the podcast with Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady on his views on the directory's evolution.  The podcast is posted at LibSyn and available via the iTunes directory as well.  (Comments and suggestions for future podcasts are welcome.)

Disclaimer: I was employed at Optaros as part of the management team from February 2005 until September 2006.

Seth Gottlieb Leaving Optaros

Seth Gottlieb was one of the earliest employees at Optaros, running the Content Management Practice, and he developed the great in-depth "Content Management Problems and Open Source Solutions" report.  (Optaros is in the process of updating the orginal, so it's no longer on their site.) 

Seth is setting himself up in business as "Content Here".  He's deeply knowledgeable about content and document management systems, the open source CM space, and he's massively vendor neutral (to the chagrin of many vendors).  Seth is also a contributor to the CMSWatch Report, and a regular speaker at the Gilbane conference.  Look him up on his blog.

Good luck, Seth!

Optaros Publishes its Open Source Catalogue

[Update 23 July, 2007: Optaros has relaunched the catalog as an online resource.]

Optaros has published its first Open Source Catalogue.  It includes 262 projects and was developed over the past year as the developer/consultants installed and used the components for clients and their own work internally.  They have made best efforts to rate them according to functionality (in an enterprise context), maturity, available support, community vibrancy, and "enterprise readiness". 

This of course sparked a certain amount of immediate controversy as some felt their project got short shrift, but as is stated in the catagolue:

While Optaros took great care in consolidating this catalogue and applied multiple cycles of feedback and quality assurance, it is still possible that some information is presented in an incomplete or even inaccurate way.  Also different people might have different opinions or different experiences. 

Optaros is open and ready to accept feedback and additional input for improvements.  For this an email address is provided: [email protected]. Please use this email for sending us your feedback and ideas.

It's a great first effort to try to provide a starting point for enterprise IT people to learn about free and open source software, with lots of educational material in the front.  It will be interesting to track this document over time.  It (as all Optaros white papers and reports) is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.   

Disclaimer: I worked for Optaros from Feb 2005 through Sept 2006 as vice-president, open source development strategy. 

The Optaros Open Source Year-in-Review

I was talking with Dave Gynn over the weekend.  He'll be presenting the Open Source Year in Review webinar tomorrow (Tuesday, 12 December, 1pm Eastern).  I've had a bit of a preview of the event, and it promises to be informative and fun.  He's including predictions for the year ahead as well, and they'll certainly make you stop and think.  Here's the sign-up link. 

À bientôt, Optaros

I have left Optaros.  I have a unique opportunity to co-found a start-up again, building the technology side of the company, and I would always regret passing it up.  Such opportunities are rare.

It's been a privilege to be a part of the Optaros management team and to contribute through its initial stage of growth, helping shape the open source software positions and strategy, and to work with the awesome team there.  The consulting teams continue to put the company on the map by consistently delivering excellent work. It's been my pleasure to have helped put the company into the public eye working with the press and analysts, demonstrating our thought leadership, and keeping the company well represented in the larger open source software community.  Optaros has a brilliant future in front of it.  I will sorely miss working with the team.

But now I get to build a new team again.  People that have heard me talk about building the technology team at Softway Systems will know that I believe there is nothing more fun than building the team and unleashing it on a righteous problem.  The new company is still very much under cover, but we will be delivering a web hosted solution for small business communities through a lean and simple browser interface.  We are Portland, OR based.  Think AJAX.  Think Ruby-on-Rails.  Think open source software.  Imagine turning certain bloated business software idioms on their collective head.  Imagine what trust and reputation really mean in a community of companies.  The recruiting drive begins .... NOW. 

Copyright lightmatter

Overcoming the Barriers to Open Source Adoption

Update [24-Aug-2006, 17:15]:  Here's the link to the recorded webinar.  Enjoy.

This Thursday (24 August, at 1PM EDT) I will be delivering the next Optaros webinar.  The subject is understanding trends and overcoming the barriers to open source adoption.  There is still a lot of confusion in the industry around open source, from the latest licensing changes and acquisitions, to ongoing concerns about support and maintenance and legal issues. 

The presentation will cover the four hot spots and how to think about them in the context of your enterprise.  The invitation link is here on the Optaros web site.

Optaros Open Source Educational Webinar Series Starts

For a while now at Optaros, we've been publishing various technical white papers and reports on open source software.  These aren't marketing case studies, but based on the real experience and evaluations our practise leads have put together in their respective domains.  You can find the complete white paper and report list here and an RSS feed here for all the open source educational content we're developing.  This work is all published under Creative Commons licenses to make it easier to use and disseminate. 

A short while ago, we were guests at a UNISYS webinar on open source adoption in the content management and SOA spaces.  Next week on Tues., 28 March, our own Dave Gynn will kick off the start of our own webinar series with "Open Source Adoption Trends: Where should your Enterprise Begin".  Please come out and join us and let us know what you think.

The ODF Alliance and Optaros

Optaros is an inaugural member of the newly formed ODF Alliance.  We joined the ODF Alliance because as an open source and standards centric systems integrator and consulting services company we're finding our government and enterprise customers are interested in ODF.  They want to have choice of vendors for their desktop office suites, and to regain control of their document formats in a world where their documents are increasingly created, published and managed electronically.   

The ODF Alliance mission is to educate policy makers, IT administrators, and the public on the benefits of ODF with respect to such choice and control.  We support the mission and would like to contribute to it with use cases and our experience with ODF and the use of standards and open source software.

Here is the press release from the ODF Alliance, and with it some excellent resources from their resources page.

Press and blog coverage so far:

• The New York Times (login required)
• InfoWorld article
• internetnews.com
• Bob Sutor's commentary from IBM
• Andy Updegrove's commentary
• Great Groklaw commentary

Anyone interested in the mission can join here. 

A Short Follow-up on the Optaros Free and Open Source Software Policy

Update (28-Oct-2005, 16:04): A slightly expanded version of this post ended up on Groklaw at PJ's request.
Back at the end of June, we published the Optaros Free and Open Source Software Policy. It was our statement of our belief of how we as a consulting services company have to engage with the free and open source community at large, and how we intend to run the business.  I've always been as concerned/cynical as Matt Asay of companies talking the talk without walking the walk.  As he points out:

... I sometimes worry that too many executives will spoil the original flavor of open source. By this I don't mean the "community," .... Rather, I mean the ethos of open source: giving back, collaboration, etc.

I wanted to follow-up with what we're doing since publishing our policy:

• We modified a key master services agreement such that the customer can release work-for-hire back to the appropriate communities. We have put in place a simple mechanism whereby we can agree with the customer and legally document areas that we can contribute code back that is part of the work-made-for-hire.  We continue to work forward with enterprise customers to set up our services agreements to this end in the first place.  
• We are contributing code back in a couple communities, notably ActiveMQ (we have a developer that has earned a committer role on the project), and we are getting ready to submit code back to the Spring community. 
• We are building our own first community around an in-house developed application for SOX auditing (RADAR). We claimed our SourceForge site, and the code will go up in the next week.  We're releasing it under the GPL.  Please join the project RSS feed if you want to know when the code arrives. 
• Dave Gynn has released (under the Apache license) his collection of run-time diagnostic tools which assist Java developers building Web applications, particularly using open source frameworks.  He's anchoring that community at http://www.wtfigo.org. 
  

Even I've responded to a few support questions in the OpenOffice community as I get things to where I want them on my new Mac, although admittedly that doesn't quite stack up to the work I see happening around development projects within Optaros.

It is however a good feeling to know that no one else need necessarily go through the same learning curve or make the same mistakes I made.  I've long maintained the economics of community is simple: you always get more than you give — but you have to give first.  Within a day of posting one solution I received notification of a fix to a much bigger problem I was having. 

As the management team at Optaros, we have nothing but commitment for our participation in open source communities and collaborative development and for the continued growth of that participation.   

Optaros Publishes its Free and Open Source Software Policy

Today we published the Optaros Free and Open Source Software Policy. This policy defines our expectations on how Optaros employees work with the open source community at large. Think of this as our analog to the Debian social contract both with our employees and the free and open source software community at large.  (I appreciate it doesn't go as far as the Debian social contract, however, as a consulting services company our customers may sometimes require us to do work in ways that we can't simply publish, and we need to keep a foot in both the free and the open source worlds.) 

While it reads in slightly heavy-handed legal English, the intent is to present it in terms any enterprise developer or enterprise lawyer can understand. There is a huge amount of intellectual property FUD cycling around the industry since the SCO Group started its legal dispute with IBM.  We wanted to reduce the discussion back to a very simple idea — as a business you have software assets for which you are responsible and what you choose to do with them for the best overall benefit to your stakeholders will depend upon the business you are in. We have a breadth of development experience and business experience in this space and wanted to give people a place to start having better discussions based on business pragmatism rather than fear.

We published the policy under a Creative Commons license. We want people to be able to create their own such policies in this space and re-use the parts of our policy that make sense to them without asking permission.

The one part of the policy that will be discussed a lot I'm sure is the section on our community commitment of time to community projects. First, we recognize that free and open source software forms the building blocks of the solutions Optaros develops for our clients. So we need to give back. Second, every consultant has "bench" time (a.k.a. "beach" time depending upon one's point of view) when they are not working for a client. From the business's point of view we would love to have everyone billable all the time, but it simply never works out that way. Likewise, we can't guarantee in advance that we know how much time a consultant can give back. So we have taken the approach that when an employee isn't working on a customer project, they will be working on free and open source software projects that interest them. Think of this as our Google 20% project.  The comments on Chris's post (and Joe's) are right — it's about culture and we want to set the culture at Optaros early.

I appreciate this policy may not go far enough for some in the community, but I think it's a great start as open source software spreads itself deeper into the enterprise, and I look forward to comments and discussions. 

Update (30-Jun-2005): Here are Dave Gynn's views on the policy.  (He also works at Optaros.)
Update (1-Jul-2005): Groklaw has kindly posted our policy and some commentary here.  There's an ongoing discussion at Groklaw.