Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Open Source ~ just Marketing or the Real thing?

It has come to my attention through several mailing lists, that the term: 'Open Source' is more and more used to further some companies' marketing work, without necessarily backing it up with a generally accepted FOSS licenses and are reluctant to make the source available (specifically to non-clients of that product).

From the word go, we at Bika Lab Systems tried to implement the OS philosophy as well as we could, and to the best of our understanding. Therefore seeing other software companies (whether developers or implementors) trying to vie for attention through shady marketing tactics, does not go down well with us.

I guess having a clear OS license should do the trick, but the last couple of days I have kept on wondering whether there shouldn't be some form of certification issued by a proper (governmental or not) FOSS 'referee'. What do you think?

Now, Bika Lab Systems, has tried to poll its users and developers through its Mailing Lists, to find out if we are doing enough as a company to distinguish between the Open Source Bika Community and Bika Lab systems the company. Unfortunately I got very little feedback, I guess no news is good news in this case. But it still leaves us with a little bit of insecurity...

Since having made the decision to go Open Source and subsequently releasing our software under the GNU General Public License, we had the Community website (http://bika.sourceforge.net) and the corporate Bika Lab Systems website (http://www.bikalabs.com).
We are Plone fans, that much is sure, and maintaining a static html site, seemed a bit archaic. We continually add content to the bikalabs.com website (according to one on-line tool, we have in excess of 700 public pages on the site!), which is not only directly applicable to Bika Lab Systems the company, but is the knowledge base of the Bika Community.

So here's the question that maybe readers of this blog (any?) would like to comment on; Would you be happier (feel that Bika is more FLOSS) if we moved over most of the software & help center to a new (Plone) site with the http://www.bikalabs.org URL? (the idea of the new site, would be to grant access to members of the willing community to contribute directly on the site)
And what else, could we do to make the community more involved? For example, would you be happier if Bika would be managed by a foundation (such as Plone is managed by) and if so, would you participate in that foundation?
Rolling on with the bandwagon, would you rather see a foundation for the whole of Bika, or would it be better to set-up a foundation for each industry that we are targeting, i.e. a Bika Health foundation, Bika Interlab foundation, etc?

Look forward to your comments and feedback!

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