New OSS Scorecard just in time for playoffs - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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October 02, 2007
New OSS Scorecard just in time for playoffs

Per a post I put up back in April, I said that one of the biggest issues in blogging about and researching open source software (OSS) is keeping track of the products, communities, and commercial backers. At the time I said the scorecard was timed to the beginning of the baseball season so now here is a revision timed to the beginning of the baseball playoffs.

There's pretty much a one to one to one relationship among the products, communities and backers but that relationship is not always obvious. Even for the simplest connections. For example, it's probably intuitive that the Mozilla portal is built by the Mozilla Foundation which is backed by the Mozilla Corporation. But it is probably not obvious that whole string really unravels all the way back through AOL to the original Netscape browser. As for something more convoluted but not unusual: the Sleepycat OSS database project is really a derivative of the Berkeley database that forked out of UNIX at System V time but the community is now backed by Oracle, which purchased Sleepycat in 2005.

Some OSS has a community but no commercial backing (such projects don't usually last too long). Others have commerical backing but no community. Sometimes, that is intentional and the product is really freeware rather than actual OSS. But in other cases, it is is because the project is just getting off the ground.

So to keep the players straight I have updated that scorecard. It is available as a free download by clicking where it says "Download file" immediately below. The taxonomy behind the scorecard is explained in more detail in this ebizQ.net feature article released in July. The article includes a short version of the OSS scorecard.

Let me know if there are other OSS projects you would like to see added--yours or something you want me to research.

Download file