01899nas a2200133   4500008004100000022001400041245005500055210005200110260004200162520149000204100001701694700001801711856003601729       2009                        eng d  a1913-610200aEditorial: Enterprise Participation (January 2009)0 aEditorial Enterprise Participation January 2009  aOttawabTalent First Networkc01/20093 aIn  The Role of Participation Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities, Joel West and Siobhan O'Mahony argue that "to some extent, firms and technical communities have always collaborated to create standards, shared infrastructure, and innovation outcomes that are bigger than any one firm can achieve." and that "there is increasing evidence that path breaking innovations cannot occur without a community to interpret, support, extend and diffuse them". When considered in this light, it should not be surprising that more enterprises, both large and small, are increasing their participation in open source communities to drive innovation.

The theme for this month's issue of the OSBR is enterprise participation and the authors provide practical advice for effective enterprise/community collaboration. Their experiences provide perspectives on: i) the Eclipse Foundation, which maintains an ecosystem of over 150 enterprises that participate in Eclipse open source projects; ii) an independent software vendor that sells closed source solutions constructed on top of an open source platform to large enterprise customers; iii) the impact of major players collaborating on a common open source platform for the mobile industry; iv) the role users can play in the very large (over 14 million) GNOME community; and v) the lessons a scientist from the National Research Council of Canada learned when he released software and started a small open source community.1 aLavigne, Dru1 aSmith, Donald  uhttp://timreview.ca/article/218