Open Tech Strategies | Blog - publications

Announcing a New Series: Open Source At Large

2019-05-14T04:20:00-04:00

Open Tech Strategies has a dual mission. Day to day, we help our clients understand how open source approaches fit into their strategic goals, and we help them implement those approaches. But over the long term, we also try to act at the ecosystem level when possible. The more organizations invest thoughtfully in open source, the better off open source as a whole is — and the more organizations will want to try it, in a virtuous circle.

For years we've been digging into the details of our clients' operations, customer bases, and markets in order to help them recognize and act on specific open source opportunities. While this work is tailored to each client, we are always looking for ways to publish what we learn so it can benefit a wider audience. Our work with Mozilla on Open Source Archetypes and with the World Bank on their investment strategy for the GeoNode project are two examples. We've heard from open source practitioners across the field that these materials have been helpful to them (and we've received useful criticism and feedback — the sincerest form of flattery). Perhaps most gratifyingly, we've heard from internal open source champions at organizations that are still finding their way toward deeper open source engagement, telling us that having strategy-level materials to refer to helps them make their case.

Now we have a chance to do that kind of public analysis in a more regular and focused way. Starting this week, OTS will publish a series of blog posts focused on strategic concerns in open source. The series is kindly sponsored by Microsoft, whose request to us was essentially "help organizations get better at open source" (not a direct quote, but a decent summary). They were clear about the series being independent: they did not want editorial control, and specifically did not want to be involved in any pre-approval before a post is published. It goes without saying — but we'll say it anyway, just to be explicit — that the views we express in the series may or may not be shared by Microsoft: please blame us, not them.

We'll focus on the kinds of analysis we do when we advise clients: how to identify opportunities, how to make decisions about prioritizing and shaping open source investments, how to integrate open source methods into one's business models and goals, monitoring and improving open source project health, and more. Our clients will recognize some of this material — our advice tends to be consistent over time — but much of it will be ideas we have not discussed widely before. We look forward both to offering strategic analysis to newcomers to open source and to engaging our colleagues in the open source field in a wide-ranging discussion.

Our first substantive post discussing "What Is Open Source Strategic Thinking?" is up. Watch this space for more!

Field Guide To Open Source Project Archetypes

2018-05-15T15:53:00-04:00

Open source is a broad term that encompasses many different types of projects. There is a wide range of open source approaches, and sometimes it helps to think through how your open source approach matches your goals, resources, and environment. In many places we look, we see open source used as a catch-all term to refer to every project. We don't have a common vocabulary to discuss open source in ways that take account of important differences.

OTS prepared a field guide to open source project archetypes with Mozilla that is a first step in addressing that problem. The report catalogs a number of open source archetypes we observe around the community. OTS and Mozilla have found these archetypes to be a useful resource when crafting strategy, weighing tradeoffs, and committing support to open source endeavors. Today, we share the results of this work with the community.

[embed]https://youtu.be/Lo61OOi8_4Y[/embed]

We hope it is useful to you as you design open source initiatives, weigh tradeoffs in strategy, and pick metrics to track success. The archetypes we list are useful comparison points for anybody trying to maximize the benefits of their open source investment.

You can download the report here. Mozilla blogged about it. We also put the source text on GitHub and are inviting contributions to future versions. Finally, please drop us a line at archetypes AT opentechstrategies.com if you have comments.

Report on GeoNode's path to open source success

2017-06-15T19:31:00-04:00

Recently, OTS was asked to write a report about the GeoNode project by one of its primary sponsors, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) a global partnership that is managed by the World Bank. GeoNode is a facility for sharing and displaying geographical information. It is "web-based, open source software that enables organizations to easily create catalogs of geospatial data, and that allows users to access, share, and visualize that data," as we put it in our report.

GFDRR and its Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI) work to increase community resilience to natural disasters, in particular by sharing data. GeoNode helps them do this by providing a way to easily share geographical data - what parts of a city are the lowest and most prone to flooding? Where exactly has an earthquake hit, and where is assistance needed most quickly?

Why write a report?

OpenDRI began the GeoNode project in 2009, and has been a major contributor to the code and community since then. In 2016, they decided that they'd like to contribute in another way: GeoNode as a project has been tremendously successful, and they wanted to share lessons about how to incubate an open source project. Large institutions sometimes sponsor open source projects, and do not always have success involving partners to the extent they would like. OpenDRI brought in major partners and is now no longer the primary contributor to GeoNode's development. They would like to be able to replicate this success in future projects, and wanted to offer an example to the open source community about releasing and cultivating a project like this. To clarify the example, OpenDRI asked OTS to write a report about the GeoNode project.

Our process

To complete the report, we interviewed participants in the project, from
people who had been involved from the very beginning to more recent
additions.  In general, we strove to get perspectives from people from
different levels of the contributing organizations -- not just
developers, but decision-makers and funders.  We also looked back at
tangible evidence from the earlier days of the project: commits, mailing
list archives, blog posts, and documents generated from early in-person
meetings.

Results

These interviews and research resulted in 9 major lessons for organizations starting future open source projects:

Run as an open source project from the very beginning
Engage other organizations commercially
Focus on communications and evangelism early
Find and encourage the right partners
Invest in collaboration infrastructure
Hold events and sponsor attendance
Use funding choices as a signal to peer institutions
Improve user experience to attract new users
Change the nature of your investment as needed

Flexibility and openness were both key for OpenDRI's success. While GeoNode benefited from having been built on existing open source libraries and platforms, its widespread use and adoption were due just as much if not more to the openness of its community. Its early supporters at OpenDRI shared it widely with similar organizations and worked hard to invite in new contributors.

The full report is available from OpenDRI - see their summary and a download link here, and their announcement blog post for more.

"Open source mistakes for enterprise newcomers" on O'Reilly Radar

2017-05-10T20:40:00-04:00

OTS partners James Vasile and Karl Fogel recently wrote a post for O'Reilly Radar about common mistakes that companies make when they start to get involved in open source. They write:

Open source reinvents relationships and business dynamics, turning customers and even competitors into collaborators. Firms embrace it to encourage those dynamics, when the benefits of participating outweigh the gains from going it alone with proprietary code. But open source isn't an outcome in itself. It is an approach for finding where different firms’ interests intersect and helping them cooperate there — but it is the path, not the place. To enjoy its full benefits, one must visibly walk that path.

Thanks to Andy Oram and Adam Flaherty for their expert editing and advice. You can read the full article on O'Reilly.

Dissecting The Myth That Open Source Software Is Not Commercial

2016-04-11T16:07:00-04:00

My piece "Dissecting The Myth That Open Source Software Is Not Commercial" has just been posted at the IEEE Software Blog. Comments over there, please.

Many thanks to editor Stefano Zacchiroli for editing, and for suggesting a post in the first place.