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Free open source guides launched

By Marilyn de Villiers
Johannesburg, 04 Oct 2017

For enterprises to make the most of open source, they need to participate in creating open source.

That's the view of Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation who, however, says that few organisations actually know how to be a participant in the open source arena.

Speaking at the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit held in Los Angeles recently, he pointed out that today, virtually all software development is influenced by open source.

"Just as projects are looking to create communities to sustain them over the long term, corporations are seeking to better understand how they can work with and contribute to open source."

In line with this need, he announced the launch of several new guides that have been designed to help organisations get the most from open source and engage directly with the open source community for the benefit of both themselves as well as the broader community.

Developed by The Linux Foundation in collaboration with the TODO Group, the guides are intended to help executives, open source program managers, developers, attorneys, and other corporate decision makers learn how to really leverage open source.

The non-profit TODO (Talk Openly, Develop Openly) group is a group of companies that want to collaborate on practices, tools, and other ways to run successful and effective open-source projects and programs. Its members range from Adobe to Yahoo and include such household names as IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, Google and eBay.

According to Zemlin, the guides "represent the wealth of experience of our staff, our projects and our members. They enable organisations to leverage best practices for running an open source program office or starting an open source project."

There are six guides in the initial release of the Open Source Guides for the Enterprise. The non-profit TODO (Talk Openly, Develop Openly) group is a group of companies that want to collaborate on practices, tools, and other ways to run successful and effective open-source projects and programs. Its members range from Adobe to Yahoo and include such household names as IBM, Microsoft, facebook, Netflix, Google and eBay.

The initial guides six guides can be downloaded free of charge on GitHub and The Linux Foundation Web site. They are:

* Creating an Open Source Program by Chris Aniszczyk of Cloud Native Computing Foundation; Jeff McAffer of Microsoft; Will Norris of Google; and Andrew Spyker of Netflix.
* Using Open Source Code by Ibrahim Haddad of Samsung Research, America.
* Participating in Open Source Communities by Stormy Peters of Red Hat and Nithya Ruff of Comcast.
* Recruiting Open Source Developers by Guy Martin of Autodesk, Jeff Osier- Mixon of Intel, Gil Yehuda of Oath, NithyaRuff of Comcast and Ian Varley of Salesforce.
* Measuring Your Open Source Program's Success by Christine Abernathy of facebook, Chris Aniszczyk and Joe Beda of Heptio, Sarah Novotny of Google, and Oath's Gil Yehuda.
* Tools for Managing Open Source Programs by Chris Aniszczyk and Jeff McAffer.

"The first set of open source guides draw on the experience of dozens of members of the TODO Group, who have provided invaluable open source knowledge to this project," said Chris Aniszczyk, executive director of the Open Container Initiative, a Linux Foundation project.

"The work that went into producing these guides will benefit countless individuals and organisations that are looking to improve their open source program practices."

Additional guides are planned for release at a later date.

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