When I originally discovered open source software, most of the projects were usually works of love, developed by passionate amateurs in their free time and that were interesting but were often not production ready, poorly documented and sometimes less innovative than closed source software. In other words, open source software was, at the time, mostly a cheaper, less powerful alternative to mainstream established software mostly considered because of budget constraints
Open source software development at its finest is a communal effort. It has proven itself a viable model in several areas of software development
In this blog post, I talk about the reality of building open source enterprise software, at least talking from personal experience. Open source software is, at least from an engineering point of view, possibly the best way to develop software
While some goals and aspirations of Social Business seem new to many organizations, they are not new in the software world
Support open source. With common products like Android, Apache,Wikipedia, and Word Press, chances are you already use open source on a daily basis. In the ECM world, open source software typically means lower costs, more flexibility, and faster implementations
However, coming from an open source background as the co-founder and CTO of Alfresco, open source has had a profound impact on Web 2.0 and is having a profound impact on Enterprise 2.0
When Google announced Google Drive, their new alternative to Dropbox, I became curious and also installed their desktop client syncing software
With serious support from enterprise software vendors such as Jive, SAP, SocialText, IBM, Nuxeo, Atlassian and others, OpenSocial is being adopted by organizations who need to bridge social content and corporate content management systems. Just as CMIS has accelerated its adoption across ECM applications due to developer contributions to the open source Apache Chemistry project, so is OpenSocial finding critical mass with the open source Apache Shindig project
I was engaged to implement some accounting / order processing software for them (ended up selecting ACCPAC vWhateverWasCurrentIn1991)
It is also getting much easier to maintenance and deploy new versions of enterprise software, which makes it possible for in-house solutions to stay up to date with the latest technologies and features (such as mobile access). The real solution, I believe, lies in enterprise open source software