.Net Magazine: Employ Open Source Oversight

“Open source has grown from its early days, when it battled
against large corporations’ control of the computing environment,
to become a standard way to build and deliver software. Currently,
there are numerous projects underway that act as either the
foundation for commercial products (such as NetBeans’ Forte for
Java or Eclipse’s WebSphere Studio Application Developer) or
reference implementations of Java standards (such as Apache Tomcat
as the reference implementation for the Servlet and JavaServer
Pages containers). As such, several organizations using Java are
now deploying open source application implementations as part of
related commercial software (for example, IBM WebSphere uses the
Apache Web server code base). mySQL offers its products in two
forms: an open source free download covered by the General Public
License (GPL) and a commercial package with a traditional license.
In addition, the open source community feeds the standard Java
Community Process (JCP), creating reference implementations or new
working groups. Microsoft has stayed away from the open source
movement itself, but it does share pieces of its source in certain
venues and it makes a number of open source libraries and
components available to the .NET community.

“As you’ve witnessed the growth of the open source trend, you
might be considering how to integrate open source software into
your organization’s development efforts. To assist you in this
process, I’ll outline some of the issues you must consider when
evaluating open source options, including license types, product
support and company maturity, and legal recourse…”

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