There Is No Open Source Community

This post was originally published on my first blog, hosted by Harvard Law School's Berkman Center.

Professor Jerry Mechling invited me to be a guest instructor in his "Leadership for a Digital World" course at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government today.  As part of  the class, we're interviewing Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn on the state's priorities for IT-enabled initiatives.  Peter is a well-known proponent of open-source software alternatives for the public sector, and a primary force behind the Government Open Code Collaborative.

To help myself prepare for the class, I've put down some observations on open-source which I hope will be helpful to others for whom open-source is unfamiliar but potentially important.  In the past, I've been a user of open-source software, a senior executive in both open- and closed-source software firms and at an impartial integrator, a board member of an open-source software consortium, and a sponsor of mission-critical application development efforts that use open-source software in major organizations.  So hopefully my experiences will be helpful too.