Management policies lag behind

The good news is the deployment of open source is growing. The bad news is that policies managing those projects are an afterthought, InformationWeek reports.

Those are the results of an informal survey of developers at the Software Development West 2009 conference, held in Santa Clara, California last week.

"There are a complex set of compliance, security, and management problems that can surface when OSS is used at enterprise scale, but these concerns seem to be secondary to getting the work done," says Peter Vescuso, executive VP with Black Duck Software.

The open source media player Songbird has been updated to version 1.1.1 which includes several new features and bug fixes, reports Heise online.

The new version of the Mozilla-based media player now has the ability to watch a folder hierarchy for changes and automatically import new tracks to a user's library.

Additionally, if a file is removed from a folder, the corresponding track will also be removed from the music library.

Richard Stallman once wrote that the point of free software is that it is "free as in freedom, not free as in beer", meaning that people should be at liberty to do as they pleased with software, rather than subscribe to its restrictive licences, according to guardian.co.uk.

As the recession takes hold, the stress may be on the second half of his now-famous aphorism and to the millions downloading free software in a recession; the point is that it is free - as in free beer.

Since Stallman first made his rallying cry as the founder of the free software movement in the 1980s, the way that software has been developed and distributed has been transformed.