Learn how to establish a program to manage internal open source use and external contributions.

The road to strategic use of open source starts with a carefully planned, organized, and empowered open source program office to guide and manage its creation, distribution, and use. But that’s just a first step. To get such an office underway and running smoothly, you need the right tools. These mission-critical tools will be used to track goals ...

Open source program managers must demonstrate the ROI of their efforts. This guide provides an overview of some of the standard ways that organizations evaluate their open source programs, projects, and contributions. Learn what to measure, how to define success, and how to best use this information to advance your open source program objectives, ...

Open source has become the de facto way to build software — not only in tech, but across diverse industries. As companies use open source code to build their own commercial products and services, they also see the strategic value of contributing back to those projects. However, diving in without an understanding of those projects, their ...

One of the most important responsibilities of an open source program office is ensuring that your organization meets its legal obligations when integrating open source code with proprietary and third-party source code in your commercial products. You need to establish guidelines on how developers can use open source code, and detailed processes to ...

Once a company has participated in open source communities long enough to build a reputation, it’s in a position to launch its own open source projects. It’s at this stage of open source participation that companies can realize the greatest benefits from open collaboration. You can open source proprietary projects that could be of use to the ...

Open source development requires a different approach than many organizations are accustomed to. But it becomes easier if you have a clear plan to follow. Fortunately, so many companies and individuals have already forged a path to success in contributing to significant open source projects. They have tried and true methods for establishing a ...

This Open Source Guide is designed to offer advice about how your enterprise and your development team can plan for the day when you are ready to end or move away from an unneeded open source project. By shutting down the project gracefully or by transitioning it to others who can continue the work, your enterprise can responsibly oversee the life ...

Integrating into open source communities takes time and effort and requires a new approach to product development. Where traditional, proprietary development requires secrecy and a management hierarchy, open source development requires openness and values consensus. Code contributions, not title or position, are what determine influence and ...

The majority of companies that use open source understand its business value and identify its advantages in efficiency, flexibility, interoperability, and speed of innovation. Yet only half of these companies report practicing basic open source management, such as community development, code maintenance, and the like, according to the latest ...