Тенденции и перспективы развития свободного ПО

We recently hosted a customer advisory board (CAB) meeting in Paris with many of our European customers to discuss best practices, trends and the future of FOSS in their organizations. Some of their observations shed interesting light on FOSS best practices, for example:

Automation Capabilities

We had an in-depth discussion about best practices for rolling out a FOSS management and governance solution across the company. The discussion quickly centered on the automation capabilities and usability of the solution. A common goal of the group was to minimize the amount of time the software development organization spends using a governance solution [1] and maximizing the time they spend on developing, i.e., make it as integrated or “built in” to the development process as possible.  Automation is critically important to relieving the burden of manual identification from software developers.

Integrating FOSS Management and Governance with ALM Infrastructure

Another hot topic was how to best integrate the FOSS management and governance solution with their existing application lifecycle management (ALM) infrastructure.  In particular integration into source code management (SCM) and build tools was viewed as highly important in order to turn FOSS management and governance into an automated and standard development process.

Using FOSS in New Applications

The discussion also turned to how to make better proactive decisions on using open source in new products or applications. We agreed that selecting a FOSS project shouldn’t be based on technical merits alone. The size and activity of the community behind the project as well as commercial companies offering support were viewed as important criteria.  But how can the developer get that information in an efficient way? Interestingly, there is a significant amount of information on FOSS projects and communities available on free site like Github and ohloh.net [2].

Conclusion

Understanding the need for company-wide solutions to managing and governing FOSS use is rapidly becoming a trend; one that is heartening for us all.  The better organizations understand how to best utilize FOSS, the more likely they are to use it extensively and, in my humble opinion, innovation will soon follow!  It’s time to move from reactive FOSS management to proactive FOSS use, and I’m happy to play even the smallest role therein.

Source: From Paris with Love: FOSS Trends

CC-BY-CA Анатольев А.Г., 11.01.2013