Open Source for the Enterprise or Managing Industrial Knowledge

Open Source for the Enterprise

Author: Dan Woods

Open source software is changing the world of information technology. But making it work for your company is far more complicated than simply installing a copy of Linux. If you are serious about using open source to cut costs, accelerate development, and reduce vendor lock-in, you must institutionalize skills and create new ways of working. You must understand how open source is different from commercial software and what responsibilities and risks it brings. Open Source for the Enterprise is a thoughtful guide to putting open source to work in the modern IT department.

Open source software is software whose code is freely available to anyone who wants to change and redistribute it. New commercial support services, smaller licensing fees, increased collaboration, and a friendlier platform to sell products and services are just a few of the reasons open source is so attractive to IT departments. Some of the open source projects that are in current, widespread use in businesses large and small include Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, JBoss, and Perl. Open source has entered a new area where it is being used as a marketing device, a collaborative software development methodology, and a business model.

This book provides something far more valuable than either the cheerleading or the fear-mongering one often hears about open source. The authors are Dan Woods, former CTO of TheStreet.com and a consultant and author of several books about IT, and Gautam Guliani, Director of Software Architecture at Kaplan Test Prep & Admissions. Each author has used open source software for some 15 years at IT departments large and small. They have collected the wisdom of a host of experts from IT departments, open source communities, and software companies. Open Source for the Enterprise provides a top to bottom view not only of open source technology, but of the skills required to manage it and the organizational issues that must be addressed.

Table of Contents:

1	The nature of open source	1
2	Measuring the maturity of open source	29
3	The open source skill set	45
4	Making the ROI case	67
5	Designing an open source strategy	79
6	Support models for open source	95
7	Making open source projects easy to adopt	105
8	A comparison of open source licenses	117
9	Open source under attack	127
10	Open source empowerment	137
A	The open source platform	147
B	End-user computing on the desktop	151
C	Open source and email	159
D	Groupware, portals, and collaboration	175
E	Web publishing and content management	189
F	Application development	203

Go to: Meaningful Scents Around the World or The Diabetic Traveler

Managing Industrial Knowledge: Creation, Transfer and Utilization

Author: David J Teec

Managing Industrial Knowledge illuminates the complex processes at work in the creation and successful transfer of corporate knowledge. It is now generally recognized that the competitive advantages of firms depends on their ability to build, utilize and protect knowledge assets. In this volume many of the foremost international authors and pioneers of the study of knowledge in firms present their latest work and insights into organizational knowledge and innovation.

In a world where markets, products, technologies, competitors, regulations, and even societies change rapidly, continuous innovation and the knowledge that produces innovation have become key. The chapters in this keynote volume shed new light on the contextual factors in knowledge creation, the links between knowledge and innovation in all aspects of business life and the processes by which these may be fostered or lost in organizations.