Supply Chain Awareness
An excerpt from Business Success with Open Source by VM (Vicky) Brasseur
When many companies start to think about FOSS with respect to their business, they immediately jump to the idea of releasing projects. This thought process often sounds like, “Let’s release this software! Everyone will show up and use it and love it and give us a lot of free work and advertising!”
Other times, the thoughts are, “We have this software lying around. We don’t really use it anymore so let’s release it as an open source project and let it be someone else’s problem. Then our company will get attention for releasing it.”
Recently though, the thoughts have trended toward, “We’re building a company around this software. Let’s give it away for free as a FOSS project, drive traffic to the website and gain name recognition, then figure out how to convert that into profit.”
The Releasing-FOSS-Means-Profit stars in the eyes of these business leaders are blocking them from seeing the more obvious opportunities right in front of them. For the majority of businesses, the lowest hanging fruit where FOSS is concerned is not releasing FOSS projects but instead gaining awareness of the FOSS that they are already using.
As mentioned in Chapter 1, if your company is building or using software then it’s already using free and open source components. Despite this, the majority of companies have no idea what sort of FOSS is in play within their organization.
Teams need to get their jobs done and FOSS enables them to do that more efficiently, so the teams use FOSS components — then they move on to their next task. Meanwhile, these components continue chugging along in the background, unknown, untracked, and unnoticed . . . and potentially holding the door open for all sorts of unsavory and potentially devastating risks.
Therefore, before considering what software to release, companies should first look to see what software they’re using. The almost complete lack of awareness of their FOSS software supply chain is a gaping hole in their overall strategy and can sink them as readily as a poor product launch.
We hope you enjoyed this excerpt from Business Success with Open Source by VM (Vicky) Brasseur. You can purchase the ebook (now in beta) directly from The Pragmatic Bookshelf:
