Communications Enabled Applications

The May issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "Communications Enabled Applications" and the authors include:

Craik Pyke, Senior Technical Architect at Nortel, examines the shift in traditional telecommunications business models.

Daniel Cardenas, Software Architect at Rezact Inc, demonstrates how a small company improved customer service and increased operational efficiency by implementing communication enabled applications.

Andrew Ceponkus, a project manager within IBM’s Tivoli Provisioning Manager Quality Assurance team, provides an overview of lessons learned from an investigation of collaborative telehealth systems delivery in Canada.

Patrick O'Halloran, a Staff Design Engineer with Xilinx Inc., presents the key licensing considerations when using CEA building blocks.

Jean-Pierre Poulin, an entrepreneur, discusses the lessons learned by his startup's approach to communications enablement.

Elias Majic describes his startup's experiences in integrating communications services.

The editorial theme for the upcoming June issue of the OSBR is Growing Business and the guest editor will be Mekki MacAulay. Submissions are due by May 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

Cloud Solutions

The April issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "Cloud Solutions" and the authors include:

David Linthicum is the CTO of Bick Group, an author, and thought leader on cloud computing. Dave's article starts with a discussion on the causes of the shift to cloud computing. He then clarifies the meaning of the broad term of cloud computing by identifying its key characteristics, different deployment models, and various components. Dave finishes with an important discussion on the value and economics of the cloud.

Fred Waldner is an independent consultant and a Certified Professional Project Manager. His article discusses how the shift to cloud computing mirrors the same challenges that we witnessed with the shift to enterprise adoption of the Internet in the 1990s. He identifies some of the adoption obstacles that must be overcome.

Daniel Crenna is an award winning developer, author, and active entrepreneur. Daniel articulates the value of open source in hosted solutions as companies adopt cloud computing. He examines the reasons why companies use established open source software or give away their proprietary code as the seeds of new open source projects.

Ronald Schmelzer is a Managing Partner at ZapThink LLC. His article addresses the debate about private clouds. There are many companies that are afraid of deploying critical applications and/or data in a public cloud environment. Instead, many are contemplating building their own internal cloud which goes against much of the value proposition of cloud computing and keeps their dependency on expensive commercial software. Ron argues that the concept of private clouds is a marketing term used by vendors rebranding their products.

Tom Lounibos, CEO for SOASTA, discusses how the pay-as-you-go cloud computing model allows SOASTA to simulate performance tests with loads that were simply not feasible in the on-premise world. Low cost, on-demand cloud computing services allow companies to deploy more reliable and scalable solutions because they can now afford to test peak loads and fix bottlenecks before they happen in the production environment.

John Crupi is CTO and Chris Warner is Vice President of Marketing at JackBe Corporation. Previous articles discuss how the lower levels of the stack are becoming a commodity and that IT's focus should be on business functionality. John and Chris provide some examples of how organizations are leveraging mashups to aggregate data from various locations into composite applications.

The editorial theme for the upcoming May issue of the OSBR is Communications Enablement and the guest editor will be Chris McPhee. Submissions are due by April 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

March Issue on Mobile Published

The editorial theme for the March issue of the OSBR is Mobile. The guest editors are François Lefebvre from Communications Research Centre, Canada and Thomas Kunz from Carleton University, Ottawa. This month's authors include:

Andreas Constantinou is the Research Director at VisionMobile. His article discusses the importance of governance models to understand the dynamics of an open source product, constrasting it to the better understood role of licences. Using the mobile industry as an example, he demonstrates how governance models can be used by open source sponsors to control the development of open source products, and argues for more education and clarity on governance models.

Jason Kridner is the open platforms principal architect at Texas Instruments Incorporated. His article discusses the challenges and successes in establishing a vibrant ecosystem around the BeagleBoard, a low-cost, fan-less single-board computer. The efforts within this community have allowed the BeagleBoard to become a versatile and powerful open embedded device.

David Burgess of the OpenBTS Project discusses the project's experiences, which will probably become the first case of a free software GSM basestation in a public cellular network. The article focuses on the challenges of the project, as well as the advantages of having followed the open source route.

François Lefebvre leads the Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting team at Communications Research Centre, Canada. His article surveys CRC’s attempt to increase collaboration and innovation in the field of mobile broadcasting by developing and offering complete end-to-end free and open source software toolsets.

Carl B. Dietrich, Jeffrey H. Reed, Stephen H. Edwards and Frank E. Kragh discuss OSSIE, a university-based open source Software Defined Radio project at Virginia Tech. OSSIE software has proven useful for rapid prototyping by industry as well as for published research and education of hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students. In addition to examples of OSSIE’s successes, the project’s challenges and approaches to mitigating and overcoming them are described.

Hal Steger, Vice President of Marketing at Funambol, inc., introduces the cloud computing paradigm as a way to deliver mobile applications and data. His article discusses trends that are driving the adoption of the mobile cloud, important components of mobile cloud infrastructure, and the role of open source.

Bradley M. Kuhn is the Policy Analyst and Technology Director at the Software Freedom Law Center. He briefly reviews the history of free software in the mobile device space, focusing on both software and hardware. A review of the available alternatives to-date leads him to conclude that users, while able to access open code bases from major companies, are at the mercy of these companies. For a number of reasons, true software freedom on mobile devices is, as yet, an elusive goal.

Startups

The February issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "startups" and the authors include:

Lisa Torjman and Jon Worren from MaRS, an innovation hub for Canadian science and technology startups, discuss why Canada needs to invest in and nurture a culture of entrepreneurship in order to create successful startups.

Mekki MacAulay, principal at OSStrategy.org, highlights special considerations and pitfalls for open source startups and discusses how startups can use an open source strategy to gain competitive advantage.

Tony Bailetti, Director of Ontario's Talent First Network, describes nine companies located in Canada’s National Region and identifies how their founders benefit from the Lead to Win business ecosystem.

William Stewart, CEO of ESERI, describes one startup's experience in integrating open source software into a complete turn-key solution.

Harley Finkelstein, a serial entrepreneur, answers the question "Which is the better path to take, as a push or a pull startup?".

As always, we encourage readers to share articles of interest with their colleagues, and to provide their comments either online or directly to the authors.

The editorial theme for the upcoming March issue of the OSBR is Mobile and the guest editors will be Thomas Kunz and Francois Lefebvre. Submissions are due by February 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

Don't forget to visit the website every Friday to check out each week's column. The columnists for February include Christopher Sean Morrison from BRL-CAD, Stephen Huddart from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, Van Lindberg, author of Intellectual Property and Open Source, and Emma Jane Hogbin of HickTech.

Success Factors

The January issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is "success factors" and the authors include:

George Neville-Neil, a member of the FreeBSD Project's core team, examines how one particular open source project has developed processes which provide its users, customers, and partners with a product that is stable, reliable, and long lived.

Janet Swisher, a professional technical writer, describes the importance of user assistance to the success of open source projects and offers some suggestions on fostering community contributions to open source user assistance.

Brent McConnell, a Community Consultant at Collabnet, presents some of the actions open source community leaders can take to concurrently deliver results and a system that encourages productivity and longevity.

Mekki MacAulay, Principal of OSStrategy, discusses how passive participants in open source ecosystems play an important role in value creation in the ecosystem.

Belinda Lopez, Training Project Manager for Canonical, explores curriculum creation models and some of the conditions that are necessary for successful collaboration between creators of existing open source documentation and commercial training providers.

Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, answers the question "How can a community be considered "open source" if its primary objective is to promote commercialization?".

Starting on January 8, we will offer a weekly column written by open source experts, in addition to the monthly issue of the OSBR. Our first columnist will be Stephen Huddart, Vice President of the J. W. McConnell Family Foundation. You can view the column on the OSBR website and blog.

The editorial theme for the upcoming February issue of the OSBR is Startups. Submissions are due by January 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

We hope you enjoy this issue of the OSBR and share articles of interest with your colleagues.

Value Co-creation: Part 2

The December issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is Value Co-creation and the authors include:

Michael Etgar, Professor at the School of Business Administration in the College of Management– Academic Studies in Israel, presents several factors which may enhance the ability of consumers to engage in co-production.

Tony Bailetti and David Hudson provide concrete examples of co-creation projects in vendor neutral ecosystems using lessons learned from operating the Lead to Win ecosystem.

Stoyan Tanev, Mette Knudsen and Wolfgang Gerstlberger, all from the University of Southern Denmark, share their insights from an attempt to position value co-creation within an integrative vision for innovation management research and practices.

Liz Sanders, President of MakeTools, and George Simons, a researcher into innovation strategies, compare three types of value co-creation: monetary, use/experience and social.

Alex Pedrosa, Assistant Professor at The Mads Clausen Institute, highlights the first results of a qualitative study that focuses on the different types of value stakeholders can expect from co-creating innovations.

Venkat Mangudi answers the question "what lessons can "green" computing learn from open source?"

The editorial theme for the upcoming January issue is "Success Factors" and submissions are due by December 20. Contact the editor if you are interested in a submission.

Part 1: Value Co-creation

The November issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is Value Co-creation and the authors include:

Kim op den Kamp from the Technical University Eindhoven provides insights from her research into three main business model elements of co-creation communities: the value proposition, the value network, and the revenue model.

Stephen Allen, Tony Bailetti, and Stoyan Tanev present their research on the key components of value co-creation between firms and end customers based on the application of web search and Principal Component Analysis techniques.

Aron Darmody, a Doctoral Candidate at the Schulich School of Business, demonstrates how granting consumers freedom through co-creation has become the most effective mode of production for contemporary marketers.

Tore Kristensen, a Professor at Copenhagen Business School, explores the nature of personal transformations and their co-creation aspects.

Anna Kirah, Vice President of CPH Design, shares experience driven insights on how co-creation can help business in an age of uncertainty.

Arts & Media

The October issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is Arts & Media and the authors include:

John Bell from the University of Maine New Media department describes how open source tools and philosophies can be adapted to facilitate other forms of distributed creative endeavours. He introduces two tools developed by the Still Water Lab, The Pool and the Variable Media Questionnaire, and describes how several of the ideas used in software development have influenced Still Water's approach to making tools that support artistic production.

Karen Opas-Lanouette, editor for Ucreate Media, discusses the historic genesis of one company's development of a portal and platform system that enables creators and their fans to work collaboratively between different mediums. Her examination includes how the company met the challenges that arose and which are common to many startups.

Anthony Whitehead, Director of the Carleton University School of Information Technology, examines how open source tools and content can be used throughout the entire process of film creation. He describes many of the tools which are available for every step in the production pipeline.

Aaran Duncan, owner of Digital Deceptions, and Glenn McKnight, owner of Global Catalysts Consulting Service, explore the increasingly intersecting worlds of Social Media, mobile, and open source. They describe how Social Media has the potential to change the way communities use and create open source.

As always, we encourage readers to share articles of interest with their colleagues, and to provide their comments either online or directly to the authors. We hope you enjoy this issue of the OSBR.

The editorial theme for the upcoming November issue of the OSBR is Co-Creation and the guest editor will be Stoyan Tanev from the University of Southern Denmark. Submissions are due by October 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

Open Source Business Intelligence (BI)

The September issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is Business Intelligence and the authors include:

John Kemp, a Principal Consultant, and Benjamin Dietz, a BI Consultant, provide a primer on BI, introducing the terms and concepts used throughout the issue.

David Currie, founder of Clearview Informatics, examines the keys to success that allow an organization to extract maximum value from an investment in BI software.

John Kemp takes a look at how buying patterns have changed and what it means for businesses looking at open source BI software.

Steve Holub, a BI Consultant, reports on a recent survey of open source software tools used in BI and data warehousing systems.

Benjamin Dietz and Lily Singh of SQL Power Group compare the features of four popular open source reporting solutions.

Thierry Badard, CTO of Spatialytics, highlights the need for geospatial BI software and the integration of the spatial component in a BI software stack in order to consistently enable geo-analytical tools.

Tom Bondur, Content Development Manager in the Developer Communications group of Actuate Engineering, and Jason Weathersby, the BIRT Evangelist at Actuate Corporation, introduce BIRT and discuss why Actuate chose the open source development model and the benefits that this project brings to the BI user community.

Sam Selim answers the question "What will Oracle do with Sun's open source offerings?".

The editorial theme for the upcoming October issue is Arts & Media and the Guest Editor is Anthony Whitehead from Carleton University. Submissions for this issue are due by September 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

August Issue of OSBR Available

The August issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is Tech Entrepreneurship and the authors include:

Brian Hurley, CEO of Purple Forge, provides an overview of ecosystem models and highlights, through numerous examples, how it is possible to take advantage of the related, like-minded and even competitive players in an ecosystem.

Carlo Daffara, head of research at Conecta, presents the results of a recent survey of over 200 open source companies, demonstrating the economic advantages of open source across a wide variety of business models and commercialization approaches.

Peter Carbone, an ICT executive and Coral CEA champion, discusses an approach to commercialization through the creation of a new ecosystem for communications enabled applications.

Gordon Quinn, CEO of iPic Innovations, writes about entrepreneurship in an Internet-enabled world. The Internet was certainly disruptive and spawned a number of new ecosystems. Gordon looks at how to disrupt for gain in that context.

John Boden, CTO at Movius Interactive, takes on the issue of entrepreneurship within existing enterprises. Innovation and culture are closely linked and he explores the role open source can play in stimulating both.

James Bowen, an entrepreneur and adjunct professor at uOttawa's Telfer School of Management, answers the question "what do investors look for in a business venture?".

The editorial theme for the upcoming September issue of the OSBR is "business intelligence" and the guest editor will be Mike Andrews from SQL Power. Submissions are due by August 20--contact the Editor if you are interested in a submission.

July Issue of OSBR Available

The July issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The editorial theme this month is Collaboration and the authors include:

Joseph Wilson, co-founder of the Treehouse Group, explains how successful adaptation to market conditions comes from collaboration across traditionally demarcated fields of study.

Stephen Huddart, Vice President of the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, and Anil Patel, Executive Director of the Framework Foundation, propose the concept of Applied Collaboration Studios for the social sector.

Peter Deitz and Christine Egger from Social Actions describe how this organization applies open source principles to its products and processes.

Evan Andrews, an analyst at Sylvatica, discusses open analysis methods, software, and data that can be used to help companies become greener.

Norm Friesen, Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices at Thompson Rivers University, describes recent developments in the adaptation of open education resources.

Chris Tyler from Seneca College outlines Seneca's approach to sustainably involving students in open source communities in a course setting.

Andy Adler, Canada Research Chair in biomedical engineering at Carleton University, John C. Nash, retired Professor of Management in the Telfer School at the University of Ottawa, and Sylvie Noël, research scientist for the Communications Research Centre of Canada, introduce the TellTable open source system designed to allow single-user software applications to be managed in a collaborative manner.

The editorial theme for the upcoming August issue is Tech Entrepreneurship and the Guest Editor is David Hudson from Lead to Win. Submissions for this issue are due by July 20--contact the Editor is you are interested in a submission.

May Issue of OSBR Available

The May issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats. The theme this month is "open source in government" and the authors include:

Gijs Hillenius, news editor of the Open Source Observatory and Repository, provides an overview of recent advancements and setbacks in the implementation of open source and open standards by public administrations in the 27 member states of the European Union.

Edgy Paiva, Director of IVIA, gives some examples of successful projects within the Brazilian Government that use open source and explains some difficulties for implementing open source.

Mike Gifford, president of OpenConcept Consulting, discusses the global momentum in federal government departments to support open source and problems with the current federal government's procurement process in Canada.

Darlene Meskell, Director of Intergovernmental Solutions at GSA, provides an overview of current open government initiatives in both the United States and other parts of the world.

Tom Schmit, an instructor at Riga Business School, and Zigmunds Zitmanis, Vice-Rector for Information Technology at Riga Technical University, discuss the reasons for the University's choice of an open source product as the application to provide the single point of entry into electronic services.

The editorial theme for the upcoming June issue is "women in open source" and the guest editor will be Rikki Kite from Linux Pro Magazine. Contact the editor if you're interested in a submission for this issue.

April Issue Available

The April issue of the OSBR is now available in PDF and HTML formats from http://www.osbr.ca. The theme this month is "Open APIs" and the authors include:

TIM Program students provide a glossary of terms associated with Open APIs and present some resources that discuss their business value.

Michael Weiss from Carleton University describes a research framework to examine the structure of the mashup ecosystem and its growth over time using network analysis to obtain key characteristics of the ecosystem and identify significant ecosystem members and their relationships.

G.R. Gangadharan, a research scientist at the Novay in the Netherlands, provides an overview of open API licensing, provide examples from current open APIs, and briefly discusses open licensing of open APIs.

Owen Byrne, Senior Manager of Travelpod Labs, compares the features of the most commonly used JavaScript Toolkits used to create rich Internet applications and how freely available toolkits are able to compete against proprietary alternatives.

Steven Muegge and Roberto Milev of Carleton University describe a method for examining the evolving modularity of large-scale software systems and introduce a new modularity metric for comparing code bases of different size.

Byron Thom, a student at at the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Law, summarizes a recent Torys Technology Law Speaker Series presentation which introduced a novel interpretation of copyright in the age of OSS using a spatial framework to deal with open source licenses.

The editorial theme for the upcoming May issue is is "Open Source in Government" and the guest editor will be James Bowen from the University of Ottawa. Contact the editor if you're interested in a submission for this issue.

January Issue Available

The January issue has just been announced. You can read it online in either HTML or PDF format.

December Issue of OSBR Available

The December issue is now available in HTML and PDF formats. The theme this month is "Enabling Innovation".

The theme for the upcoming January issue is "Enterprise Participation" and the guest editor is Donald Smith from the Eclipse Foundation. Submissions for this issue are due by December 22--contact the Editor if you would like to submit an article or any news or events.

November Issue Available

The November issue of the OSBR is now available in HTML and PDF formats at the OSBR website. The theme this month is "Health and Life Sciences" and Brian Barry and Peter Tanner from Open Health Tools are this month's guest editors. The articles in this issue include:

Brian Barry, CEO of Bedarra Research Labs and CTO of Open Health Tools (OHT), covers OHT's planned development of a common platform. In his article, he applies his experience with the founding of Eclipse to the problems of interoperable healthcare.

Mark Yendt, Duane Bender and Brian Minaji of Mohawk College describe their reference implementation of the Canada Health Infoway pan-Canadian Electronic Health Record Solution. They see the need to involve a range of partners from both the private and public sector to achieve success for the project.

Jacob Brauer of WebReach describes the Mirth Project, an open source healthcare interface engine and interface repository created and professionally supported by WebReach. Mirth attacks the interoperability issue directly through providing an interconnecting middleware for health information systems.

Skip McGaughey, Executive Director of OHT, and Ken Rubin, a senior healthcare architect, describe the requirement for a more out-reaching community which encompasses end users, operational users, and developers.

Jon Siegel and Richard Mark Soley explore the relationship between open source and open standards by examining the results of their interviews of developers of open source tools based on open standards.

The editorial theme for the upcoming December issue is "Enabling Innovation" and the guest editor will be Steven Muegge from Carleton University. Submissions for this issue are due by November 22.

September Issue Published

The copyedit crunch is finally over and the September issue of the OSBR has been announced. We were literally overwhelmed with submissions this month and some very well written articles had to be held in the editorial queue to await publication in the October or December issues. We also held off the publication of the two most recent lectures from the TIM Lecture Series until October--otherwise this issue would have been over 60 pages long.

The October editorial theme is "Building Community". Looking at the submissions we have received thus far, it looks like this will also be a large and very thoughtful issue. I'll be providing previews of the upcoming authors and their topics over the next few weeks.

More on the Upcoming Issue

The September issue is now before the advisory board for final review and the creation of the PDF and HTML versions will start in earnest this weekend. The announcement on this issue's availability will be made by the end of next week.

In addition to the authors mentioned in the previous post, this issue contains insights from:

John Roese, Nortel's CTO, explores the social and strategic benefits achieved through Nortel's participation with the One Laptop Per Child project.

Allyson Hewitt, Director of Social Entrepreneurship at MaRS, explains the importance of social technology and innovation intermediaries to achieve positive outcomes for social innovation initiatives.

Nancy Doubleday, an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University, introduces the concept of adaptive co-management and how it can be used to foster projects that effect far-reaching change.

Kim Matheson, Carleton University’s Vice-President (Research and International), discusses the critical role universities play in enabling social innovation.

Welcome to the Open Source Business Resource

Since the Open Source Business Resource began publishing in July of 2007, we've been concentrating on creating a resource of quality, non-technical documentation about open source written by authors who deal with open source on a daily basis. Fourteen months later, we have published over 100 practical and thought provoking articles and several dozen more are in the queue waiting to be published. You'll find articles that address topics such as licensing, enterprise readiness, security, interoperability, and support from authors with backgrounds ranging from research, academia, various industry sectors, non-profits, and open source projects or foundations. All content is freely available in HTML or PDF formats and provided under a Creative Commons license.

To some degree, we've become a victim of our own success. Looking at all of the available content, where does one begin? We've started this blog to help readers find content useful to them and to showcase the many gems and resources provided by our authors. We look forward to sharing with you the insights we've learned from our authors as well as receiving your feedback.