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What TODO means for open source community

The 'Talk Openly, Develop Openly' alliance's goal is to have less downtime and faster, more regular, releases of content, says Sven Lesicnik, MD of LSD Information Technology.


Johannesburg, 10 Jun 2015

Open source software is not just meant for still-struggling start-ups that can't afford to pay the licensing fees for proprietary software, and budget-conscious, modest small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMEs) hoping to cut down on IT costs. This was proven in late September when several major companies - running the gamut from technology, right through to retail and media - came together to form the TODO project.

"TODO, which stands for 'Talk Openly, Develop Openly', is an alliance formed by a group of powerful corporations, including social networking site Facebook, search engine giant Google, micro-blogging site Twitter, the New York Times, and retailer Walmart," explains Sven Lesicnik, Managing Director of LSD Information Technology, a company specialising in providing its clients with open source, vendor-neutral solutions.

This move is neither sudden and strange, nor surprising, Lesicnik says. "Many members of the TODO group have already been making use of open source software or even developed their own. Facebook, for example, uses the Linux operating system (OS); Google developed Android, the most popular mobile OS in the world, which also happens to be open source, and Twitter can be credited for developing Bootstrap, an open source framework for Web site creation."

Since open source software is what keeps so many of these major technology-based companies up and running, TODO was formed with a specific goal in mind: with so many of those major companies using these platforms, it is difficult to keep track of which versions developers are working on, making it harder to keep tabs on possible errors and implement subsequent bug fixes.

As a blog post in the New York Times explains: "Facebook, for example, may release new parts of its software twice a day, far faster than the pace at which open source releases came out in their earliest mainframe computing days, and with far more participants creating and consuming open source software in the client-server computing era of 20 years ago."

And now that the overall systems have to be developed to work on mobile phones, tablets and apps - therefore making the remote computing infrastructure even more complex - there are legitimate concerns that developers working on different versions of programs, trying to maintain quality, run frequent updates and make revisions, will lead to breakdowns of the software. TODO will aim to address those challenges.

"Their goal is to have less downtime - and faster, more regular releases - of content that still has to be of top-notch quality, though," says Lesicnik. "So, in other words, to basically have open source software be every bit as good as expensive proprietary software, but without the high costs and without forcing users into obligatory and binding licensing fees."

Open source continues to go from strength to strength as more enterprises turn to open source solutions on an almost daily basis. Statistics reveal this trend will not only continue, but grow.

"Information technology research and advisory firm Gartner forecasts that 95% of all mainstream IT organisations will use some element of open source software - directly or indirectly - within their mission-critical IT solutions by 2015," Lesicnik concludes.

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Editorial contacts

Nicole Brits
LSD Information Technology
(+27) 10 500 0573
nicole@lsd.co.za