With Any Luck, You Don’t Have An Open Source Policy!

Jason van Zyl | Computerworld | July 9, 2013

With component usage skyrocketing, shouldn't every organization have an open source governance policy? My experience shows this is not the case. And as a developer, if you don't have a policy, consider yourself lucky! Why? Because policies are a pain. They burden your development effort with unnecessary overhead. And if you are like most us, you spend your time working around policies while seeking forgiveness later.

But maybe it's not the policy that's the problem… maybe it's the implementation of the policy that is the issue.

Because as developers, we want

  • to produce quality applications free of defects.
  • to deliver secure applications that can't get hacked.
  • to protect our organizations from a potential loss of intellectual property (IP).