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Panel: Open Source Software Successes and Challenges

Margaret Elliott, ISR

Pankaj Garg, ZeeSource

Jason Robbins, UCI (formerly Collab.net)

Walt Scacchi, ISR (moderator)

ISR Research Forum

8 June 2004

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Who is investing in OSS?• Large corporations: (IT and Financial)

– IBM-Eclipse, Sun-NetBeans and OpenOffice, HP-Gelato, Apple-Darwin, Microsoft Research-Rotor, SAP-DB, etc.

– Barclays Global Investors, DKW, Merrill Lynch, UBS• Mid-size corporations:

– RedHat, Novell, Borland, BEA Systems• Small (start-up) companies:

– ActiveState (now part of Sophos), Collab.Net, Jabber, Ximian (now part of Novell), JBoss, Compiere, etc.

• Government agencies:– U.S.: DoD, Energy, NSF

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Panel questions

• What is the basic difference between free versus open source software business models for software development?

• What are some notable OSS success stories and why?

• Is the OSS repository, SourceForge.net, safe with VA Software in the long-term?

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Panel questions

• How do you distinguish the good from the bad OSS projects?

• What challenges or opportunities will the oss community face next?

• How do F/OSS developers earn income from working on free/open source software projects?

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Panel questions

• How are the successes and challenges of OSS different from or the same as those faced by closed source software development?

• Should OSS developers reveal their corporate identities?

• How can businesses building proprietary software convert a product to a F/OSS project and continue making profits?

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Panel questions

• How can the successes and challenges of OSS be understood in traditional software engineering terms?

• How can traditional software development organizations learn from the successes and challenges of OSS, or the other way around?

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Open sourcesoftware research

Web site atUCI