Richard Fontana

So does the City of Raleigh have any policies favoring or at least ensuring nondiscrimination against open source software? This is what a number of governments, including urban ones, have been doing. See e.g. San Francisco's COIT software evaluation policy, which requires departments "to consider open source alternatives, when available, on an equal basis to commercial [sic] software".

I'm not sure how any city could claim to be an "open source city" without policies in place to at least put open source software on an equal footing to proprietary software.

I do think there is something to the idea of cities having cultures that may resonate in interesting ways with FOSS culture even when there is not much of any open source software culture or economy to speak of. I believe my own native city, New York, is one such place, and I may write further about this on OSDC at some point.

The original comment made me think of Red Hat's record in "open sourcing" significant-scope, new or previously internal or proprietary software projects. Frankly, it is a mixed record, in terms of how much of a diverse community of contributors/users forms around the project. Failure to attract contributor communities can occur for many reasons. While I think such community-building fail is sometimes unavoidable (sometimes, despite your best efforts, no one will be interested in contributing to your project), there have certainly been cases where we're doing something that unintentionally has the effect of discouraging contribution. (I have previously discussed one past example of this on opensource.com - the <a href="https://opensource.com/law/10/6/new-contributor-agreement-fedora">Fedora contributor license agreement</a> - although Fedora is probably Red Hat's biggest community-building success.)

In light of all that (and bearing in mind that opensource.com is not actually an open source project!), I think that if 52% of the top contributors to opensource.com in its first year are non-Red Hatters, that is a rather impressive start, and it shows that those actively involved in administering and contributing to the site are doing something right.

Melanie's comments about the Government channel are also applicable to the Law channel; there is strong interest in getting submissions, particularly from outside Red Hat.