OpenBRR Corporate Community

1
OpenBRR Corporate Community

• Murugan Pal
• SpikeSource
• George Pace
• Prudential Financial
• Linux on Wall Street, New York 24 April 2006

2
What are some of the top Open Source Selection
Issues for IT Managers?

• What is the impact of Open Source Software (OSS)
  on my organization?
• How do I best evaluate an OSS component?
• How can I compare similar OSS components?
• How do I identify and/or manage OSS risks?
• What are valid maintenance and support options?
• Who can I talk to about OSS issues?

3
Enter the Business Readiness Rating Initiative

• Formed in August 2005
• Board of Directors and Steering Committee formed
• Official release of BRR Framework Model
• Subgroups Taxonomy, Data, Corporate Use
• Overall Goal
• Provide a trusted, unbiased source for evaluation
  of open source software
• Provide a mechanism for evaluating OSS software
• Help people identify OSS suitable for their needs
• Provide IT managers with a methodology to help
  minimize risk in making OSS choices

4
How will it help address the Top Open Source
Issues?

• Business Readiness Rating Initiative
• Addresses the Quantifiable Issues
• Provides an open, comprehensive, standard
  assessment empirical model
• Accomplished via a standard framework for
  calibrating Business Readiness of free and open
  source software
• OpenBRR Corporate Community
• An approach to address the Business as Usual
  issues

5
Business Readiness Rating model
6
OpenBRR Corporate Community

• OpenBRR
• Corporate Community Overview
• maximizing knowledge across organizations

7
Corporate IT Challenges Too many components
8
Corporate IT Challenge Support Issues
9
Approaches towards Support

• Participate in a Community
• MySQL, STRUTS, LINUX etc
• Benefits of participation include project
  influence and intimate knowledge of the product
• Drawback is that this requires a larger
  investment in terms of staff participation in
  the project
• Leverage Commercial Vendors
• A Business As Usual approach for companies
• Which stack are you using / are they
  supporting?
• Participate in a Corporate Community
• Join a group who is focused on the broad range of
  issues that larger companies typically face

10
OpenBRR Corporate Community Guiding Principles

• Trusted, Dedicated and Self moderated communities
  for sharing business oriented OSS information
• The membership is only by invitation
• The information will be licensed under Creative
  Commons
• The information will be strictly available only
  for the members
• Any derivative publishable documents will be made
  available as part of OpenBRR publications

11
Corporate Community Business Chapter

• Targeted at CIOs and IT Directors
• License Information Caveats
• Legal Questions
• Open Source Project Review
• Open Source Project Viability Analysis
• Project Evaluation Reports

12
Corporate Community Technology Chapter

• Targeted at Enterprise Architects Lead
  Developers
• Security Issues
• Tested Patches
• Testing Suites
• Common Tools
• Interfacing Modules Libraries
• Technical Advisories

13
Next Steps

• Near Term
• Monthly Newsletters
• Wiki Threads
• Private Discussion Forums and Email Lists
• Recent Additions
• Audit Reports
• BRR Evaluation Templates

14
Speaker contacts

• Murugan PalFounder CTOSpikeSourcempal_at_spikeso
  urce.com
• George PaceSystems ArchitectPrudential
  Financialgeorge.pace_at_prudential.com