A few months ago I interviewed Gianugo Rabellino, CEO of SourceSense, for a piece for Oxford University’s OSS Watch service. Gianugo is an engaging fellow and clearly passionate about open source software (OSS). For him we are in the midst of a revolution, and, as he told a workshop just before I interviewed him: “revolution is hard stuff. Heads get chopped off. There is violence. There is turmoil. But in the end you get to a new order of stability in which some new things are taken for granted.”
For him OSS is much more than a debate about who owns the code and what kind of licence it has. It is a revolutionary new way of working that is about the development of an open and collaborative community centred around that code. He sees this as the profound change that OSS has brought and argues that this way of working is widening rapidly beyond code to cover other information products (such as scientific research). The term Open Development Method has been coined for this and you can read more in the article “Avoiding abandon-ware: getting to grips with the open development method”
Tags: Open Source, OSSWatch, Oxford, Rabellino, sourcesense
Tech Lunch 
June 22, 2009 at 12:53 pm |
I like the term “abandon-ware”, it’s applicable to quite a few Open Source Software projects that I could name!
Martin
June 22, 2009 at 4:25 pm |
I guess this true, or has been in the past. I think the idea is to try and avoid ‘abandon-ware’ by actually building a community around the software!