Reflections on one year of opensource.com

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Opensource.com

A year ago today, we turned on the lights at opensource.com.

Our hope a year ago was to create a place where people could gather to learn about and contribute to the growing movement toward applying open source principles beyond the software industry.

You have shared your stories about how open source principles are changing your world and the world around us.

So I want to say thank you. Thanks to the opensource.com community of readers and writers who have offered their time, comments, suggestions, articles, and tweets--all to make the site a success. You helped us share more than 500 stories that highlight places where the open source way impacts businesses, government, education, the law, and our lives.

Dozens of you contributed articles--from students leading open source in their schools to luminaries like Gary Hamel, Tim O’Reilly, and Simon Phipps. These articles were read a combined 1.3 million times by over 500,000 different people. Just a few of the stories we learned about:

  • How open source is having a positive impact on education. In the article series Introducing students to the world of open source," we learned how one group of college students spent two days immersed in the culture and code of the open source community.
  • How open source principles are being used to help organizations innovate. Henry Chesbrough, who quite literally wrote the book on open innovation in 1995, gave a fascinating webcast presentation led by Gary Hamel. Chesbrough spoke about how companies are changing how they innovate based on openness, collaboration, and meritocracy.
  • How openness begets more openness. Elphel is an open source camera used for NASA projects and for Google Street View. Fans used it to develop a high-definition, open, digital cinema camera that could be built affordably. "Apertus: The open source cinema project" tells the story behind that project, named based on the word for "openness" in Latin.

I’ve enjoyed following the organizations and initiatives I've discovered on the pages of opensource.com. You've taught one another, inspired ideas, and created new leaders who have emerged through their participation in the site.

This community has helped plant the seeds, yet there is much left to do. The door is open for the open source way to bring success to non-technology companies, as well as to schools, universities, governments—to the world. I eagerly await the day the open source way becomes the rule rather than the exception. Our hope will be to provide a place where we can shine a light on the progress along the way.

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Jim Whitehurst is President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source enterprise IT products and services. With a background in business development, finance, and global operations, Whitehurst has proven expertise in helping companies flourish—even in the most challenging economic and business environments.

9 Comments

I have enjoyed the ride here so far! :-)

It's been a great year and have enjoyed learning more about the open source way.

Thanks to everyone who contributed articles, comments ,.. and to also to our administrator Jason Hibbets for the nice communications :-)

Paul Booker
i <3 ilovetheopenweb

On behalf of the students and faculty at <a href="http://foss.rit.edu">FOSS@RIT</a> congratulations and thank you to all the folks who have made this community what it is. This is a wonderful outlet for our stories and campaigns, and we look forward to sharing even more this coming year.

@Jim Any more statistics / analytics about the site that you can share?

Thanks to the team that so diligently works on Open Source Dot Com. I really enjoyed writing for OSDC and am pleasantly surprised that some of my articles are attracting heated comments long after they were written! It is always great to have an engaged audience.

Good to know that the site completed a successful year...
Really excited and curious to know more and i have started to take serious interest in open source..thanks for being such a great source of information..

Congrats and I can't wait to see where this goes in the future.

OSS became a reliable alternative not only for professionals and geeks for their private use, but for companies and their employees in the daily routine work. In the meanwhile, you can build a whole surrounding based on OSS solutions, starting with a ticket system (f.e. OTRS, KIX4OTRS for IT service management), over inventory and SAM (f.e. opsi) on linux servers (f.e. Univention) and ERP tools (f.e. lx office). Mostly, it is about the integration possibilities and opennes between the systems that allows you to build your own IT surrounding the way you need it. Simply saying, it's about your freedom of cutomization and openness towards customers and their needs. Additionaly, you don't pay for products (mostly), but for services around product (implementation, support, customizing), so your CFO is glad to spend less money for the same level of products and services.

All looks very interesting. Looking forward to getting involved.

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