Private-Collective Innovation: Let There Be Knowledge - Ali Kousari; Chris Henselmans (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
Many innovators (companies or individuals) opt for a private innovation model. This model uses resources to create a product whose intellectual property (IP) is protected by the firm. At the opposite end of the scale is the collective innovation model, in which innovators collaborate and expend resources to produce a public good. Many free/libre open source software (F/LOSS) projects rely on collective innovation. Some innovators are now combining the two models into a private-collective innovation model, in which an innovator may chose to collaborate with other innovators and spend private resources while still keeping some IP private. For example, a company may release its product's source code to the public in the hope of attracting a community of contributing developers. Such a company commits its own resources to a project, but may still hold on to the intellectual property. The success of private-collective innovation is dependent on many factors including: project interest and value, company reputation, and project status. There are benefits and risks to private-collective innovation which must be carefully weighed before making a decision to employ this model. Private-collective innovation involves the sharing of knowledge and, in some cases, the sharing of IP that may or may not be patented.

A Progress Report on the Keystone Off-The-Shelf Project - James Makienko; Antonio Misaka (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
In this article, we provide an update on the Keystone Off-The-Shelf (KOTS) project. We begin by presenting an overview of the goals and the advantages of KOTS. Next, we describe the software components that make up KOTS. Finally, a blueprint for the first application of KOTS is described along with the plan to launch a collective of technology companies and a non-profit organization that will use, support, and evolve the software.

Proving the Expertise of Freelance Android Developers - Igor Sales; Aparna Shanker (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
Android continues to grow in popularity as a mobile operating system. With this constant growth in popularity comes a demand for skilled, specialized platform and application developers rather than just generalists that are currently provided by outsourcing firms. This article describes a business opportunity where a collective of proven experts can be used to fulfill this need for specialized developers. A key aspect of the proposed solution is the provision of proven expertise by certifying and guaranteeing the level of specialization of developers in the collective.

Quality-Based Co-Value in SaaS Business Relationships - Xian Chen; Paul Sorenson (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
In the past decade, the focus of information technology (IT) development has been on service-oriented architecture, especially the new service delivery model, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Accordingly, interest in quality management in the planning and operation of SaaS systems has increased tremendously. In practice, it is necessary to take into greater account the nature of service quality shared by both service provider and customer in the SaaS delivery. This paper introduces a study on a theory that integrates the service quality and value co-creation (co-value) in the SaaS business relationships between service provider and customer. The theory is established, in part, based on the results of a survey of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) that shows a strong correspondence between the service quality required or desired by a client and the business relationship needed between SaaS clients and providers. We have used the theory as the foundation for an approach and tool for evaluating SaaS applications.

A Rapid Prototyping Environment for Student Entrepreneurs - Frank Horsfall (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
This article describes a project initiated in the Technology Innovation Management (TIM) program at Carleton University to develop a common development and test environment for entrepreneurs associated with the program. This environment will support a collaborative entrepreneurial community that is building complementary products around a core platform; the goal is to accelerate the quick delivery of projects to market while acknowledging that the community's resources are limited. As described in this article, the solution that was developed is called the TIM Rapid Prototyping Environment (TIMRPE). Thee TIMRPE provides a competitive advantage for entrepreneurs in the TIM program. A TIM entrepreneur can quickly jump into the development of their prototype, knowing that timely assistance and support is available. This environment now hosts several entrepreneurial projects, some of which have been described in recent issues of the OSBR, including this one. This article introduces the rapid prototyping approach, provides an overview of the TIMRPE, shares lessons learned from the early experiences with the environment, and outlines the project's next steps.

Reasons for Patent Protection and Cost-effective Patent Filing Options for SMEs - Natalie Raffoul; Art Brion (Technology Innovation Management Review, 2011)
Many innovative small and medium enterprises (SMEs) do not seek patent protection for their innovations, either because they are skeptical about the perceived benefits or wary of the perceived costs. However, by failing to protect their intellectual property with patents, they leave themselves exposed to attack by other patent holders. This article explores arguments for patent protection as well as filing options that can protract the patenting process while simultaneously reducing patenting costs. By choosing their patent application filings wisely, SMEs can keep their patenting options open for as long as possible while delaying costs.
Keywords: innovation; intellectual property; patent cost; patent filing; patent protection

Redefining "Women's Work": Tensions Between Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Social Reproduction - Tess Jewell (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
This article considers some of the most recent research into women's participation in technology and entrepreneurship and connects it to the literature on social reproduction in order to paint a more complex picture of the social and environmental factors that influence women's career choices. Specifically, it shows how lingering biases concerning women's reproductive functions continue to shape both men and women's expectations regarding women's aptitudes, interests, and fitness for various roles. These biases and stereotypes create barriers to women's progress at various levels, including the home, the workplace, and educational institutions. The article concludes with recommendations for how educators and entrepreneurs in science and technology can promote the inclusion of women among their ranks.

Reflecting on Fifty Issues of the OSBR - Chris McPhee (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
This is the last article to be published in the Open Source Business Resource (OSBR). In September 2011, the OSBR will become the Technology Innovation Management Review. In this article, we look back upon the changes in the landscape of open source business and in the OSBR itself from the time it was first published in July 2007 until its last issue in August 2011. Finally, we look ahead to the upcoming changes that will be embodied by the Technology Innovation Management Review.

Renewal Through Co-Creation in Business Networks - Raimo Hyötyläinen; Katri Valkokari; Petri Kalliokoski (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
This article presents four models of business renewal within networks based on a theoretical framework developed from earlier literature. According to the typical dimensions of business development, our framework distinguishes between the exploitation of present knowledge for efficiency and the exploration of new knowledge for new business development. Furthermore, the two network development and governance types (i.e., hub-spoke and multiplex) form the other dimension of the framework. The framework was empirically tested with five case companies and their business networks. The framework of network models may help managers to structure the business network and its renewal based on the strategic targets of a firm. Furthermore, the theoretical contribution of the paper deepens the understanding of how co-creation and interaction between the participants differ according to business focus and complexity of networks.

A Sales Execution Strategy Guide for Technology Startups - Ian Gilbert; Stephen Davies (Technology Innovation Management Review, 2011)
The majority of startups fail to consider sales execution as part of their overall strategy. This article demonstrates how a sales execution strategy can help a company take a product or service to market more efficiently and effectively by focusing on the customers that are key to generating revenue. Combined with techniques for recruiting effectively and measuring sales outcomes, a sales execution strategy helps technology startups exceed growth aspirations and potentially reduce or even eliminate the requirement for external investment. In this article, we first describe the focus of assistance currently given to startups and the reasons why sales execution strategies are often overlooked. Next, we outline recommendations for developing, implementing, and supporting a sales execution strategy. Finally, we summarize the key points presented in the article.
Keywords: entrepreneurs; sales; sales execution strategy; sales strategy; startups

Shifting an Entrepreneur's World View - Michael Ayukawa (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
As an entrepreneur, you continually test your decisions by gaining feedback: from your customers and your investors (or lack thereof). This process of ongoing feedback is how an entrepreneur learns to shape their opportunity to accommodate their new knowledge of the environment. But this activity is very dependent on the "world view framework" of the entrepreneur. What may seem to be important turns out to be noise and important signals are dismissed. This article describes the special value for an entrepreneur of frameworks grounded in theory in general and the value of the framework of business ecosystems from two perspectives: as a member of a business ecosystem and as a creator of a business ecosystem. These two perspectives fundamentally affected the direction of adaption for our product and reshaped how we approached our (ad)venture.

The Social Management of Risk - David Péloquin; Jean Kunz; Nicola Gaye (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
In this article, we discuss a conceptual framework on the social management of risk and highlight the role of the community sector in that process. We introduce the topic of risk, illustrate how it is distinct from the concept of uncertainty, and show how different social actors assess risk differently. Next, we introduce the "social management of risk" approach, which takes a broad view of the potential actors involved in pursuing societal objectives in relation to risk. Finally, we discuss the role of the community sector is the social management of risk. While this framework is presented in the context of social policy, it can be generalized to any situations where social actors respond to and manage risks in a multi-player environment.

Software Patents: Current Challenges and Future Solutions - Monica Goyal (Technology Innovation Management Review, 2011)
Software patents for years have been used in the software industry to suppress innovation, kill competition, and generate undeserved royalties. This article considers whether software patents maintain the right “bargain between the inventor and the public” where, in exchange for disclosure of the invention to the public, the inventor receives a limited monopoly and the exclusive right to exploit the invention. This article argues that they do not and then explores possible solutions to address the problems identified. Those solutions include streamlining the patent process, making it more difficult to patent software innovations, making it easier to invalidate software patents, and shortening the patent protection from 20 to 10 years. The article closes with a call to action for people to work collectively to effect change in the industry.
Keywords: innovation; patent system; software patents

Software-as-a-Service Offer Differentiation by Business Unit - Islam Balbaa (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
This article summarizes the author's recent research into the fit between software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools and the requirements of particular business units. First, an overview of SaaS is provided, including a summary of its benefits to users and software vendors. Next, the approach used to gather and analyze data about the SaaS solutions offered on the Force.com AppExchange is outlined. Finally, the article describes the managerial implications of this research.

The Strategic Impact of Corporate Responsibility and Criminal Networks on Value Co-Creation - Frederick Ahen; Peter Zettinig (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
This article is motivated by the increasing concern about the ever-declining security of pharmaceutical products due to the abundance of counterfeit network actors. We argue that if networks are effective mechanisms for criminal organizations to infiltrate into any value chain, then networks should also work for responsible businesses in their quests to counter this phenomenon of value destruction, which is ultimately detrimental to the value co-creation process. Thus, this article demonstrates a nuanced understanding of the strategic impact of corporate responsibility of actors in networks on value co-creation. The current discourse on value co-creation in business networks is structured in such a way that it precludes its inherent corporate responsibility component even though they are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, research on value co-creation aimed at the proactive and responsible defence of a network substance via value co-protection has been mostly scant. We propose a model of value-optimization through value co-protection and ethical responsibility. This way of theorizing has several implications for both policy making and managerial decision making in the pharmaceutical industry and beyond.

Trusted to Lead: Trustworthiness and its Impact on Leadership - Taina Savolainen; Sari Häkkinen (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
This article discusses trust in leadership, a major issue in current business management. Paradoxically, in the environment of continuous change that characterizes many organizations today, trust is needed more but is enacted less. Trust forms a foundation for functioning relationships and co-operation. Trust is intangible - it is an intellectual asset, a skill, and an influencing power for leaders. Leadership by trust emphasizes trustful behaviour towards employees. In this article, we suggest that, in trust formation, it is trustworthiness in leader behaviour that matters. Showing trustworthiness by competence, integrity, benevolence, and credibility makes a difference in daily leadership work. The importance of trust in leadership has been widely recognized in the literature and business practice. This article focuses on how leaders enact on trust by showing trustworthiness to subordinates. The ways of building and sustaining trust and the effects of trustworthy and untrustworthy leader behaviour are examined. Two real life cases from industrial companies are presented and their implications are discussed. In conclusion, a leader's competence (ability) is one of the key dimensions in showing trustworthiness. As to untrustworthy behaviour, it is worth noting that building and sustaining trust is reciprocal in nature. A practical implication for leaders is that the development of an awareness of trustworthiness and skills for demonstrating it should be a top priority in the current business environment, which demands strong interaction, cooperation, and communication abilities.

Using Value Co-Creation to Redefine Business Models - Kati Järvi; Antti Pellinen (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
In the information and communication technology (ICT) sector, a revolution is underway in the delivery channel of mobile service (or application) production and provision, and application stores are building up a central position as intermediaries in service delivery. The market is transforming from being one-sided to being two-sided. Thus in this article, we focus on integrating the business model concept with value co-creation with respect to the emergence of two-sided markets and intermediaries. As the transformation from a one-sided to a two-sided market and the birth of intermediaries bring forth value co-creation possibilities, this article aims to find out how value can be co-created in different mobile service production and provision models.

Which Gender Differences Matter for High-Tech Entrepreneurship? - J. McGrath Cohoon (Open Source Business Resource, 2011)
With data from successful founders of high-tech companies, we identify traits common to large majorities of them and any gender differences in those traits. There are few. Further, we identify criteria that might lead to gender imbalance among successful founders by comparing similarities and differences in the gender distribution of these traits among the general population and among successful founders. We find that signature traits of successful founders include: motivation by the desire to build wealth, and not by the inability to find traditional employment, nor because they developed a technology in a lab environment and wanted to see it make an impact; belief that startup success was due to prior industry or work experience, lessons learned from previous successes and failures, the company's management team, and good fortune, not because of state or regional assistance or alumni networks; access to mentors, and little financial pressure for a steady income. None of these dominant traits appeared to be required unequally of men and women, although some traits were unequally distributed in the general population.

Assessing Trust Between Members of a Marketplace - Eduardo Moraes (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Trust is very important to companies that participate in electronic markets and the keystone organizations that operate these markets. No company wishes to deal with a keystone that is not trustworthy or purchase a solution from a supplier that it does not trust. To grow a community, the keystone and the suppliers that are its marketplace members must be trusted. Providing users of a marketplace with tools to measure trust in suppliers' solutions may reduce transaction costs and increase the number of deals closed. The objective of this paper is to examine how to measure trust in suppliers' solutions offered in a marketplace. The discussion on how to measure trust in a keystone is deferred to a later paper. This paper is organized into six parts. The first part defines trust and the second examines the concept of trust transitivity, which is the use of indirect trust in a trust network. The third part describes how trust can be measured. The fourth provides an overview of the author's research, which examined how the numbers of observations about a solution-supplier's ability, integrity, and benevolence affect a customer's uncertainty and belief in the solution offered in the Eclipse Marketplace. The fifth part discusses the implications of this research for keystone operators. The last section provides conclusions and summarizes the relevance of this research.

Bloom: A Relationship Visualization Tool for Complex Networks - Frank Horsfall (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Faced with an ever-increasing capacity to collect and store data, organizations must find a way to make sense of it to their advantage. Methods are required to simplify the data so that it can inform strategic decisions and help solve problems. Visualization tools are becoming increasingly popular since they can display complex relationships in a simple, visual format. This article describes Bloom, a project at Carleton University to develop an open source visualization tool for complex networks and business ecosystems. It provides an overview of the visualization technology used in the project and demonstrates its potential impact through a case study using real-world data.

Blueprint and Approach to Grow Revenue in Small Technology Companies - Tony Bailetti (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
This article examines a new approach to grow the revenue of small technology companies and technology startups. We name this new approach the business ecosystem approach. The article is organized into five sections. The first section provides a blueprint to grow revenue and an inventory of growth formulas that top management teams of small technology companies and founders of startups find useful. The second section briefly defines business ecosystems, keystones and platforms. The third section describes the business ecosystem approach to grow the revenue of small technology companies and technology startups. It compares the traditional and business ecosystem approaches to growing revenue; identifies when the business ecosystem approach works better than the traditional approach; explains what small companies and startups need to do to grow revenue using the business ecosystem approach; and describes the benefits and risks of implementing the business ecosystem approach. The fourth section compares three approaches to growing revenue and highlights the differences between i) business ecosystems and development communities and ii) the business ecosystem approach and outsourcing. The fifth section identifies the key decisions a small technology company or technology startup needs to make to become the keystone that anchors a business ecosystem.

Building a Business-to-Business Sales Process - Stephen Davies (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
A sales strategy is not just about closing deals, it is about defining a sales process that accurately reflects an organization, its customers, and the products or solutions that it sells. By truly understanding its customers and by actually solving its customers' problems, a company can define and execute a sales process that will increase the likelihood of reaching its ultimate objective: a closed deal and money in the bank. This article describes the steps to create a business-to-business (B2B) sales process and shows how these steps are used to build a sales funnel. It also provides tips for effective and consistent execution of that process to get initial sales and improve upon them.

Building Canada's Culture of Entrepreneurship: Sure-bet to Startup Survival - Lisa Torjman; Jon Worren (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
This article aims to debunk common perceptions around why Canada seems to be failing in its ability to create successful startups. A robust startup sector will only be made possible if Canada invests in and nurtures a culture of entrepreneurship.

The Business of Open: Common Pitfalls for Open Source Startups - Mekki MacAulay (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Many entrepreneurs look at open source as a panacea of sorts, a golden ticket to success. They assume that the value of the open source approach is apparent to all, undeniable, and the only way. The mistake they often make is carrying this passion into the way they form their startup. They assume that open source startups are somehow different, and that as a result they will carry themselves. I was once such an entrepreneur, with such a vision. The reality is that an open source startup isn't really that different from other startups. It still needs to have figured out all of the essential components of a successful business. An open source strategy can certainly yield a competitive advantage, bringing faster time to market, lower development cost, collaboration opportunities, ecosystem positioning, and faster adoption. But, these advantages don't come along on their own. The open source strategy is just one piece of the larger business model. The other pieces have to be strong, too, or the whole might crumble. This article reviews the essentials for all startups and highlights special considerations and pitfalls for open source startups in particular. It also discusses how startups can use an open source strategy to gain competitive advantage by focusing the passion and energy surrounding participation in open source towards value creation and acquisition.

Cloud Computing: What is it, and How Will it Affect Organizations? - Fred Waldner (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
We believe that, in the not too distant future, most people will be making use of cloud computing. How they use the clouds will vary, but everyone will be using the cloud. It is expected that cloud computing will follow a similar path as the Internet into the corporate environment: - there will be concern about security associated with data - there will be concern about being dependent on services that are controlled by third parties - many organizations will be challenged by existing corporate processes - some organizations will be leaders in the charge while other will lag For entrepreneurial businesses, this means that cloud computing can represent business opportunities to: i) reduce costs by leveraging cloud environments to provide infrastructure and services; ii) bring an expanded portfolio of products to a global marketplace through reduced costs to access large complex infrastructure; and iii) start small and expand services quickly and economically. This article presents extracts from literature that has been published on cloud computing and provides a brief outline of a common cloud computing taxonomy used to define the cloud. After reading this article, you should have a better understanding of the basics behind cloud computing, the reasons for the large potential savings, the key challenges organizations face when implementing cloud computing, as well as the paradigm shift that cloud computing represents to organizations.

Communication Enabled Applications: What are the IP Considerations for Platform Providers? - Patrick O'Halloran (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
A platform of CEA building blocks, such as the out-of-the-box capabilities of the Coral CEA Sandbox, provides companies with the capability to quickly build new innovative products and services. Key considerations for users of the sandbox include intellectual property, licensing, and any other dependencies inherited from use of the sandbox assets. This article presents some background on this topic and examples of how to address the associated implications.

Communication Enabled CRM - Elias Majic (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Customer relationship management software is used to manage and enhance a company's interactions with its customers. Typically, CRM software integrates well with other communication software, such as email, but includes little or no integration with telephone or video conferencing systems. For companies that interact frequently with their customers or internal teams by telephone or video, this greatly limits the usefulness of their CRM system. Ideally, a CRM system offers flexibility to allow communication with customers in a variety of ways and provides consistent reporting and logging of these interactions regardless of which form of communication was used. This allows for greater insight from interactions with customers and helps better understand how to meet customer needs. This article describes our recent experiences as we set out to integrate communications services provided by Coral CEA into an open-source CRM system. CoralCEA is a platform that provides developers open application programming interfaces to easily integrate powerful communication features into web applications. In our case, we were interested in enabling telephone, telephone conferencing, and video conferencing services within a CRM application. However, the article is not just relevant to CRM users, since it illustrates how powerful communication services can be easily added to almost any existing web application. After reading this article, you will have a better understanding of the basics of CRM, how better communication improves the experience for both the company and the customer, and you will hopefully be encouraged to consider integrating powerful communication services into your own web applications.

Communications Enabled Applications: Building Value, not Monetising APIs - Craik Pyke (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Over the past decade there have been numerous attempts at opening telecom infrastructures to developers. As each attempt evolves to the next, there is an equal desire to monetise the exposure of telecom capabilities using traditional and well understood mechanisms: charge for necessary equipment upgrades and license the application programming interfaces on a per-invocation or "block of simultaneous invocations" basis. However, the various vendors and development companies involved in creating applications with embedded communications capabilities have had to re-examine their business and technology models in an increasingly competitive applications market where the rate of applications failing to gain market traction far outweighs the rate of success. This article looks at the history of telecommunications APIs and the predominant business models that have accompanied those interfaces. By analysing the history of telecom APIs and recognising the gradual shift from a strongly vendor controlled environment to a highly accessible component of IT networks, we can recognise the shift in revenue generation from a typical monetisation model to a value based model. Additionally, we can examine how incumbents and new entrants are dealing with the more unpredictable business models and emerging methods for de-risking value based revenue opportunities.

Community 101 - Brent McConnell (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Recently, a quote stirred some controversy among my peers. The part about "results are not the point" was hard for some people to understand and come to grips with. Aren't results always the point? Well, as with most things, "It depends". The people and community that evolve around an open source software project will ultimately determine its success. Even if the core team launches the project with spectacular productivity and results, this phase of evolution will be fleeting if the necessary processes and community to make the project a long lasting success are not put into place. This article presents some of the actions open source community leaders can take to ensure not only results, but a system that encourages productivity and longevity.

CRC Mobile Broadcasting F/LOSS Projects - François Lefebvre (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
The Communications Research Centre Canada, the federal government's primary laboratory for advanced telecommunications research and development, has been at the forefront of new developments in mobile digital broadcasting technologies since their inception in the late 1980s. During this time, digital replacement technologies have been standardized in an effort to rationalize spectrum use and enhance broadcasting applications with datacasting services and associated program information. Eureka DAB was the first all-digital mobile broadcasting technology to be conceived, developed and deployed. It became a widely adopted standard for digital radio in many countries around the world in the mid-1990s. DAB was officially launched in Canada in 2000. This paper presents CRC's attempt to increase collaboration and innovation in the field of mobile broadcasting by developing and offering complete end-to-end Free, Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS) toolsets for the transmission and reception of DAB and FM/RDS applications and services.

Deals Without Borders: A Value Proposition for the Open Global Commerce Keystone - Michael Ayukawa (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
The Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI) and Carleton University have envisioned the creation of a keystone anchoring a global deal-generating business ecosystem centered in Ottawa, Canada. Through the support and common resources of the ecosystem, small and medium companies located in five international capital cities will be better able to construct and close more transnational deals through a process of collaborative and open co-creation. This is the Open Global Commerce (OGC) value proposition: "Deals Without Borders."

Developing a Replicable and Sustainable Model of Business Incubation - Ian Graham (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
The only constant in the world these days seems to be the accelerating rate of change. This article explores, what are in the author's opinion, the driving forces of change; the decline of the TV industrial complex, business model migration, and the emergence of the knowledge economy. The changes in the way we live and work are having a very profound impact on how businesses start and grow. The paradigm and policy of the industrial era will not pave the way to success in a knowledge-based economy. The knowledge economy requires a significant paradigm shift in the way we structure incubators to successfully nurture and grow knowledge-based businesses.

Developing a Service Industry to Support the Sahana Disaster Management System - Mark Prutsalis (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
The Sahana Software Foundation governs humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) projects that address the information-coordination challenges of disaster management. Sahana software has been proven effective and is recommended by numerous industry sources from both the emergency management and business sectors. It fulfills critical needs to enable organizations responding to disasters to share information across organizational lines and to track and effectively manage disaster efforts. These needs are substantial and are growing because of climate change and urban population growth, which is leaving increasing numbers of people vulnerable and susceptible to the effects of disasters. Sahana fills a unique niche in the toolkit of emergency and disaster response agencies because it facilitates critical information sharing and coordination of efforts across all types of organizations and individuals involved, and is readily flexible to the needs that arise from any particular disaster. The software has its roots in the open source business community and has always been strongly supported by that industry. In this article, we describe an industry opportunity in HFOSS and provide evidence that Sahana software can be successfully commercialized. These factors make it a ripe time for open source businesses to engage cooperatively with the Sahana Software Foundation to support the growth of a service industry around Sahana software and HFOSS.

Developing a Successful Open Source Training Model - Belinda Lopez (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Training programs for open source software provide a tangible, and sellable, product. A successful training program not only builds revenue, it also adds to the overall body of knowledge available for the open source project. By gathering best practices and taking advantage of the collective expertise within a community, it may be possible for a business to partner with an open source project to build a curriculum that promotes the project and supports the needs of the company's training customers. This article describes the initial approach used by Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, to engage the community in the creation of its training offerings. We then discuss alternate curriculum creation models and some of the conditions that are necessary for successful collaboration between creators of existing documentation and commercial training providers.

Differentiating Community from Customers in an F/LOSS Business - Matthew Aslett; Stephen Walli (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
When software companies using free/libre open source software (F/LOSS) in their product and service offerings attempt to manage the customer pipeline and develop a community, problems may arise. Project communities and customer pipelines are not the same thing, although some participants belong to both groups. This creates confusion in the business and tension with the community. F/LOSS communities have been on the rise for the past two decades. Companies began to form around F/LOSS projects in the early 1990s, with some creating their own F/LOSS projects and some wrapping themselves around existing projects. This has created tension between company managers who are trying to earn profits from software that is "available for free," and from developers in communities that do not necessarily want to create software for someone else's corporate gain. This happens regardless of whether the company created the F/LOSS-licensed project itself, or participates in external communities around other projects, or both. This article demonstrates that separating the concepts of community and customer, and of project and product, allows a business to manage clearly both challenges of developing an engaged community and maximizing profits.

Editorial: Cloud Services (April 2010) - Dru Lavigne; Mike Kavis (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Cloud computing may be the biggest game changer within the enterprise since the adoption of the Internet in the 1990s and the personal computer in the 1980s. The economic climate, coupled with the rate at which technology is changing, is forcing companies to reduce information technology (IT) expenditures, increase productivity, and build more collaborative solutions as opposed to building everything internally. Cloud computing allows companies to outsource functions that are not core to their business or have become a commodity. Much of the technology driving cloud computing services is open source software. The LAMP stack has become widely adopted as the standard engine running much of the cloud services. With the exception of Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, most cloud service providers have embraced open source software, allowing them to drive costs down while providing reliable services for their customers. Pay-as-you-go is the new economic model for IT as we enter a new decade. Gone will be the days of making large purchases of commercial software with huge maintenance costs. In this new world, enterprises will consume only the services they need, only when they need them, and will pay for the resources required to scale up and down as necessary. This paradigm shift should force IT executives to focus more on building business functionality and less on managing and maintaining infrastructure and commodity applications. Open source software will play a huge role in making the shift to cloud computing economically feasible. At the same time, commercial software companies are racing to the cloud and are struggling to replace their expensive software licensing models with a pay-as-you-go model in order to make them an attractive alternative to open source software in the cloud. It should be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years. The articles that follow provide insights into what cloud computing is and how it is changing the IT landscape.

Editorial: Communications Enabled Applications (May 2010) - Dru Lavigne; Chris McPhee (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
As anyone with a smartphone can appreciate, the power of having a mobile phone that can can access the Internet creates significant value for users and opportunities for businesses. This device-level integration of communication services and web applications is now common. However, we are only now scratching the surface of the next step in value: application-level integration. The ability to integrate communications services within web applications opens up tremendous opportunities. Examples of communications enabled applications include simple click-to-call links on a website, conference calls initiated by applications or users in response to events, interactive voice response menus, and any number of other ways that communication services, such as messaging, voice, and conference calls, can be integrated into an application to add value. I recently had the pleasure of coordinating the activities of a group of entrepreneurs, developers, and architects as they explored together how CEAs can add value to their offerings and their business ecosystem. The Elena Project was funded by IRAP to stimulate small technology companies to develop working prototypes of CEAs and expand the capabilities of the Coral CEA business ecosystem and sandbox. The project focused on using four voice services and the open source web conferencing tool BigBlueButton. Among the outcomes of this project was the realization that significant value can be leveraged when communications features become integral parts of applications. In this issue of the OSBR, a diverse group of authors share their experiences and knowledge to help others explore the value CEAs could bring to their own offerings. All of the authors in this issue participated directly in the Elena project or present analysis relating to Coral CEA.

Editorial: Economic Development (November 2010) - Chris McPhee; Saad Bashir (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Economic development: these two simple words are excessively used and often misused in many contexts, including municipal government. In this issue of the OSBR, we offer a mainly municipal perspective under which we discuss what economic development means and what it can deliver. Economic development acts as a headlight that can guide a city like Ottawa through a fog of national and international competition and uncertain economic realities. It is an overarching role that nudges the local government towards smart decisions around long-term investments such as infrastructure. Achieving sustainable economic development for Ottawa means investment in the creation of a toolkit that consists of tourism development, community and social economic development, transportation access, entrepreneurship support, investment attraction, workforce development and academia, export development, and performance measurement. Such a toolkit is what encourages partnerships between stakeholders and facilitates the environment for healthy economic development conditions. This last element, performance measurement, deserves honest attention but is often found missing in an economic development plan. Just like a private sector firm that must always have its eyes on its bottom line and profitability, a city must constantly measure its economic development execution and adapt to changing circumstances. This can be achieved through a comprehensive scorecard or dashboard that analyzes trends over time, as well as compares Ottawa's performance versus its competitors. Economic development is no different than the business development unit of a firm that not only has the responsibility of creating market opportunities for its company's products, but also the crucial task of conveying back-market intelligence. From the City of Ottawa's perspective, the product we should be selling to both local residents and international community is the city brand, including business, tourism, and academia, as well as gathering competitive intelligence to continuously tweak our offering. Similar to cities whose future is dependent and linked to natural resources, Ottawa's economic future is tied to a rare resource as well. However, it is not found under the earth but between the ears of the knowledge-based workers that drive innovation in Ottawa. In today's environment, where both the knowledge-based work force and investment capital are highly fluid, the economic development challenge is to relentlessly retain and grow this knowledge resource. Economic development is the type of investment that will help Ottawa earn its way to be one of the world's leading centres for business, tourism, and academia. Conversely, lack of economic development vision and investment will undoubtedly leave the city's fortunes to luck. In this issue, the authors provide diverse perspectives and insights that will help all of us address the challenges of economic development and the knowledge-based economy.

Editorial: Go To Market (July 2010) - Dru Lavigne; Corien Kershey (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Historically, the concept of going to market is fraught with misinterpretation, doubt, and anxiety. In Canada, the term "go to market" typically means the task of readying a product for market. In this context, it is interchangeable with "commercialization," which is another concept suffering in Canada from a definition that generally does not go beyond a software maker's front door. In other parts of the world, and specifically in the U.S., the term "go to market" is clearly interpreted as meaning all the activities required to successfully launch a product into the marketplace and realize both market share and profit. Going to market is about bringing the right benefit to the right market at the right price through the right channels. Ideally, the entire go-to-market process begins with the identification of a problem or sought-after benefit that a market segment has deemed a priority. More realistically, though, it begins with identifying the segment that best suits the software offering and then determines the business model, positioning and message, pricing, channels, and engagement techniques that will work best in building share in that segment. This issue attempts to take some of the doubt and anxiety from what seems to be the daunting task of pushing a product out of the door and into the harsh realities of a demanding market. It provides clear-eyed discussions of some of the main components, tips and advice from the "battle-scarred," and useful tools that can be readily used.

Editorial: Growing Business (June 2010) - Dru Lavigne; Mekki MacAulay (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Growth is important for any business, especially technology companies that operate in an environment of constant innovation, advancement, and evolving consumer needs. It is essential to maintain long term profitability, develop a brand, and attract new investment. But the path to successful growth is not obvious, and is filled with hurdles. Growth requires capital, making consistent revenue a necessity. But figuring out the smartest way to invest capital to promote growth can be a daunting task. Growth can also require some experimentation with different stategies, weathering the occasional failure along the way, in order to find one that is the right fit for the company. But where do you start? Book stores have hundreds of books on business growth, with many promising a surefire strategy for success. But the reality is that there is no single growth formula that works for all businesses. Entrepreneurs must understand what drives their business--something that might be very different from other, similar businesses--and leverage this knowledge in order to grow. Growth requires focus, and energy must be directed on one particular aspect at a time, such as revenue growth, market growth, product line growth, or even shareholder growth. Trying to extend in all directions at once is a sure path to failure. Disciplined, incremental, consistent growth is the formula for success, no matter how that success is defined by the business.

Editorial: Humanitarian Open Source (December 2010) - Chris McPhee; Leslie Hawthorn (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
In recent years, our increasingly connected world has provided us with a greater understanding of the needs of our fellow global citizens. The devastating worldwide impact of natural disasters, disease, and poverty has been raised in our collective awareness and our ability to collectively alleviate this suffering has been brought to the fore. While many of us are familiar with donating our funds to better the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves, it is often easy to overlook a core component of facing these global challenges: information technology. The humanitarian open source movement seeks to ameliorate these sufferings through the creation of IT infrastructure to support a wide array of goals for the public good, such as providing effective healthcare or microloans to the poorest of the poor. Achieving these goals requires a sophisticated set of software and hardware tools, all of which work to save and improve lives in some of the most difficult of situations where the availability of electricity, data, IT knowledge, etc. may be low or lacking altogether. It should come as no surprise that the humanitarian open source domain attracts a great deal of attention from software developers, engineers, and others who find that they are able to both solve intense technical challenges while helping to improve the lives of others. However, to support ongoing humanitarian needs, the communities who produce humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) and hardware have increasingly identified the need for business models to support their efforts. While the lower cost of using open source software and hardware solutions means that more funds can be directed to aid and comfort those in need, the goodwill of developer communities and the funds of grantees alone cannot grow the ecosystem sufficiently to meet ever-growing global needs. To face these challenges - poverty, global health crises, disaster relief, etc. - humanitarian open source projects must fully engage the market and provide cost-effective, efficient solutions to the technical aspects of these challenges. In this issue of the OSBR, our authors from several open source software and hardware projects explore not only the global need for humanitarian open source projects, but also the business cases for humanitarian-focused ICT.

Editorial: Interdisciplinary Lessons (August 2010) - Chris McPhee; Mekki MacAulay (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Some believe that great advances, discoveries, and innovation result from concentrated efforts within distinct fields. However, progress using this traditional practice has been slowing for some time. The next great discoveries are unlikely to come from further refinements in highly-specialized fields working in isolation. Rather, they will come from creative collaboration between practitioners and researchers from two or more distinct fields, combining their knowledge, theoretical principles, and methodologies in ways never before considered. This issue analyzes lessons from other disciplines to provide a new perspective on the challenges faced by open source communities, practitioners, entrepreneurs, and other participants. The goal is to extract and apply the collective wisdom of a diverse group of authors to help solve relevant problems. The first two articles in this issue provide specific interdisciplinary lessons from diverse fields that are relevant to open source communities. The remaining articles describe projects in which platforms are being developed to promote, encourage, and analyze interdisciplinary work.

Editorial: Keystone Companies (September 2010) - Chris McPhee (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
The editorial theme for this issue of the OSBR is Keystone Companies. A keystone company is the member of a business ecosystem that owns, operates, and evolves the platform. The origin of the keystone concept is a good example of the importance of interdisciplinary lessons, which was the theme of last month's issue. In an architectural arch, the wedge-shaped piece of stone in the centre is called the keystone. It is regarded as holding all the other stones in place and the arch would collapse if it were removed. Although most arches would collapse upon the removal of any of the other stones, the keystone is usually the final stone put in place during construction and is required to realize the structural integrity of the arch. Accordingly, in addition to its central physical position in the arch, it has been given a symbolic position of disproportionate importance in relation to the other stones. The strong symbolism of the keystone has lead to the term being applied to other situations and systems where one element exerts disproportionate influence over the other elements and therefore plays a role in maintaining the integrity of the system. In particular, the term has been adopted in the biology literature using the concept of a keystone species in an ecosystem or community. In turn, the concept and its related research have been applied to the management literature where, instead of a keystone species, a particular organization or company plays the role of a keystone in a business ecosystem. In biology, the defining characteristic of a keystone species is that its influence is disproportionate to what might be expected based simply on its total biomass in the community. A classic example is the North American beaver (Castor canadensis), which exerts a disproportionate effect on its habitat through its dam-building activities. Although the "keystone" label is applied to the species, it actually reflects the role the species currently plays within a specific ecosystem. Thus, the keystone concept is context dependent; the importance of a species in one community may be different from its importance in another. The keystone species concept has been the subject of intense debate and research activity over the past 40 years. Biologists wish to identify and study the effects of keystone species primarily to guide conservation management. The keystone species concept suggests that management efforts can be focused on protecting an individual keystone species, and these focused efforts also theoretically provide protection for the other species that depend directly on the keystone or indirectly on the community it maintains. In business management, the keystone species concept proved to be a useful interdisciplinary lesson, but not before another concept was borrowed from biology. The framework of the biological ecosystem concept was first applied to the business management field by James Moore in 1993 when he introduced the term "business ecosystem" in his article "Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition." Moore used this new term to describe an economic community of organizations that co-evolved their capabilities around a particular innovation and work cooperatively to meet the needs of customers. Building on Moore's work, others have extended the business ecosystem concept and suggested that the keystone species concept in biological ecosystems can be usefully applied to business ecosystems. In particular, through their book The Keystone Advantage, Marco Iansiti and Roy Levien popularized the concept of strategically minded keystone companies that, "shape and coordinate the ecosystem, largely by the dissemination of platforms that form a foundation for ecosystem innovation and operations." In this issue of the OSBR, the authors offer different perspectives on a new approach for small technology companies, industry associations and business development organizations to generate revenue. The new approach builds on the keystone company concept.

Editorial: Mobile (March 2010) - Dru Lavigne; Thomas Kunz; François Lefebvre (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Open source software and hardware has become an accepted way of developing new and interesting applications in many information and communication technology domains: operating systems, databases, Web infrastructure, and applications. It's not surprising that with the increasing popularity of mobile handheld devices, users and researchers have explored the power of open approaches to providing innovative new applications and services in this domain. However, unlike personal computers and the Internet, mobile handsets were tightly controlled by mobile network operators (MNOs) who developed a vertical ecosystem by integrating the communication infrastructure, the handheld device hardware, and often the applications installed on those devices. The software and protocols running the mobile communications infrastructure and devices are often standardized by membership-only bodies, where large MNOs and manufacturers have a predominant influence. These players invest significant financial resources into shaping the industry along their vision to gain a competitive advantage. A current example is the ongoing battle about the dominant radio access technology for 4G cellular systems: LTE vs. Wimax. These trends have changed recently. Companies such as Google, Nokia, or Openmoko and Industry Alliances such as the Open Handset Alliance are providing the core building blocks, both in hardware as well as software, of increasingly open mobile devices. This issue of the OSBR reviews the relevant trends in the open mobile platform space from a number of perspectives. As the articles in these issue show, there is a lot of exciting ongoing work that brings the power of open source development to the mobile space. This trend is not just confined to the mobile devices as there are also efforts in the development of open mobile infrastructure elements and whole systems.

Editorial: Sales Strategy (2010) - Chris McPhee (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
The editorial theme for this issue of the OSBR is Sales Strategy. While "marketing" is everything a company does to build interest in its offers, "sales" consists of converting these offers into cash. By "sales strategy," we refer to all sales planning and process development activities leading up to the actual selling of a product or service. In his recent blog post at MaRS Discovery District, Mark Zimmerman answered a question he is frequently asked by the founders of startups: "How do we find a good sales person?" In short, his answer is "Don't." This is not meant as a slight to sales professionals, but rather, Zimmerman is advocating that companies should not equate having sales professionals to having a sales strategy. Sales professionals have a critical role to play in a company's success, but they are being given an impossible task if asked to sell something that has not been validated with customers. Zimmerman explains that sales professionals should be hired only once a company has validated that the value proposition resonates with customers and that the sales model will be effective. This lesson also applies to established companies, where existing sales staff require this same foundation to be effective. So how does a company determine whether its value proposition resonates with customers? The answer, of course, is to talk to customers. In the OSBR and elsewhere, the need for early customer input is a dominant theme in recent discussions of product development, marketing, and now sales strategy. By talking to customers, listening to how they describe their needs, and interpreting how their needs could be met, a value proposition can tested and refined. It is far more efficient and effective to iteratively refine a value proposition before attempting to sell than to attempt a salvage operation in response to slumping sales. Customer input is also a critical ingredient in developing an effective sales strategy. In this issue of the OSBR, our authors provide a diversity of perspectives on sales strategy development and implementation, including the role of customer input.

Editorial: Startups (February 2010) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Bob Sutor, Vice President of the Open Source and Linux division at IBM, recently stated that "there doesn't seem to be very many good guides about the nuts and bolts of starting an open source business". He speculates that one reason is that "there is no one way to start and run a business that involves open source". The authors in this issue of the OSBR are serial entrepreneurs, startup founders, and professionals who provide services to and interact daily with startups.

Editorial: Success Factors (January 2010) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
The editorial theme for the January issue of the OSBR is "success factors". Which factors separate the open source projects that provide quality software and receive wide-spread adoption from other projects which are not well maintained? What traits should a business look for when considering which open source software to use? How does a company decide which open source project to contribute to, partner with, or use as a base to build its products or services? The authors in this issue explore: the importance of well defined processes, the value of documentation to end users, the diverse tasks of a community manager, the value provided by participants who don't contribute code, and how a community can assist in creating training materials. Each concentrates on a particular success factor, and as a whole, provide a fuller picture of what to look for in a successful open source project or company.

Emerging Open Source Health Information Business Ecosystems in Resource-Poor Environments: the OpenMRS Experience - Dawn Smith (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
OpenMRS is a rapidly growing open source community that supports emerging healthcare environments around the world through the collaborative development of an open source medical record system platform. This article provides a brief history of the project, including how the humble beginnings of the collaborative have grown to unlock business opportunities for indigenous populations and also provide sustainable, scalable, locally supported health information infrastructures.

Enterprise Mashups: Cloud-Based, Cloud-Driven and Cloud-Derived Applications - John Crupi; Chris Warner (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
After Google Maps Mashups launched the mashup craze in 2005, this consumer-based idea quickly evolved, matured and migrated into the enterprise. Structured tools and platforms emerged that codified more formal, repeatable approaches to mashups emerged, including products like IBM Mashup Center, JackBe Presto, and WSO2 Mashup Server. Finally, the emergence of cloud-based hosting platforms and cloud-based data services have given many enterprises access to a richer set of options for mashup creation and deployment. So where are mashups in the enterprise today? The goal of this article is to document and share mashups use-cases. It is also an effort to expand upon the previous OSBR articles Open APIs, Mashups and User Innovation and Mapping Mashup Ecosystems. We hope you find it provides practical mashup implementation examples and patterns collected through empirical and anecdotal research conducted with commercial and government mashup practioners. In the last three years we have performed many formal interviews and surveys with commercial and government mashup practioners in all 50 United States and over 50 countries around the world. The examples in this article are based on the practical implementation examples and patterns collected through this empirical research as well as anecdotal information from our own implementation experiences of 'inside the firewall' and cloud-based mashups. Much of the research cited is based upon data collected from the 3,890 members of JackBe's Mashup Developer Community and that community's Presto Cloud mashup platform running on Amazon EC2. From our research we've learned many things about the ways in which mashups are (or are expected to be) applied. One macro-trend appears to unite all other enterprise mashup trends and patterns: enterprise mashups are most applicable in data-intensive areas of an organization where i) information needs are dynamic; and ii) data must reach the user. Given the explosive rate of data growth in enterprise data in recent years, enterprise mashups can have meaning to just about every organization. The cloud plays a critical role in the relevance and value of enterprise mashups. The value of a mashup increases exponentially as more data sources are incorporated into them. It is easy to assume that the onus is upon data sources inside the enterprise firewall and in the past this was generally true. The recent rapid growth of enterprise-quality cloud-based data sources makes it much easier to establish genuinely meaningful mashups from third-party data services.

Entrepreneurial Growth: An Entrepreneur's Choice - Tomas Marko (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Growth is a risky but necessary procedure for startups to survive. Growth may be assessed in the context of employees, customers, revenue, liquidity, profit, geographic locations and a variety of other dimensions. Regardless of the growth type, hurdles always exist. An entrepreneur who understands the risks, and knowingly takes them, will have a chance to grow; whereas one who is not willing to take risks will not. This article describes both the risks and benefits associated with growth. It then examines six hurdles entrepreneurs face when attempting to grow a company: company culture, networks, strategic planning, money, company structure, and skill development.

Establishing and Engaging an Active Open Source Ecosystem with the BeagleBoard - Jason Kridner (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
There should be little doubt that any given area of technology will eventually be occupied by open solutions. Rather, it is a question of "who" and "when." In mobile and embedded platforms, there is not a single dominant proprietary solution to displace, unlike desktop software. Instead, open software produces interface and compatibility experiences on par with proprietary software. At points where no proprietary solution is clearly differentiated from open solutions and the barriers to participation are kept low, open innovation thrives at the forefront of the technology. This article introduces BeagleBoard, a project that creates powerful, open, and embedded devices based on the BeagleBoard hardware, a low-cost, fan-less single-board computer. By lowering the barriers to participation and making commitments to support and sustain the architecture to preserve the innovation from that participation, BeagleBoard.org has built an active and growing community of hobbyists and professionals advancing the state of the art in low-power embedded computing, here and now.

Experiences From the OSSIE Open Source Software Defined Radio Project - Carl B. Dietrich; Jeffrey H. Reed; Stephen H. Edwards; Frank E. Kragh (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
This article briefly describes OSSIE, a university-based open source Software Defined Radio project based on the U.S. Department of Defense's Software Communications Architecture. The OSSIE software has proven useful for rapid prototyping by industry as well as for published research and education of hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students and short course participants. In addition to examples of OSSIE's successes, the project's challenges and approaches to mitigating and overcoming them are described.

Fundamentals of a Volume Market Engine - Fred Holahan (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
This article discusses the unique challenges commercial open source companies face in bringing their products and services to market. It recommends an overhaul of traditional software vendor market approaches in favour of a volume market strategy and identifies the core technology, content, and best practice methodologies of that strategy. The article is organized into five sections. The first section discusses the nature of open source customer relationships. It explains why the traditional sales funnel metrics do not apply in a commercial open source context. The second section introduces the concept of "progressive engagement" and discusses the lifecycle of open source relationships. The third section, multi-channel demand generation, identifies techniques for improving lead flow and quality by incorporating traditional lead sourcing techniques into the volume market model. The fourth section makes the case for marketing automation software and discusses some of the critical elements of an automated marketing infrastructure. The fifth section covers high-value content - the raw fuel of a volume market engine. It offers helpful insights for marketers to build and manage their content portfolios.

Go-to-Market Targeting: Know the Market and Whether It Cares - Corien Kershey (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
This article explores the importance of good segmenting and targeting to early-stage companies. Most software companies fail within the first three years, and one of the prime reasons is a lack of a focused approach to a single, carefully-chosen target market. Most software companies take the approach of attacking multiple segments simultaneously to see which will work out best, but run out of time and money before they reach an answer. A concentrated strategy that focuses resources on a single segment that the company can win and dominate quickly significantly reduces go-to-market risk. Choosing a segment in the right direction is more important than choosing the right segment. This article provides a series of six steps to help companies work through a segmenting and targeting exercise that will give them the best chance of success. The article provides real-world tools to help deal with an essential issue.

Growing Revenue with Open Source - Mekki MacAulay (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
To survive, a company must grow revenue from the core of their business. This article describes how open source can be used to help support revenue growth. We suggest seven strategies and provide examples of successful implementations for each.

How the FreeBSD Project's Processes Help Companies Build Products - George Neville-Neil (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
The processes that open source projects use to produce new work and maintain the quality of their code base is a subject that comes up infrequently in discussions of open source. One reason for this is that engineers and programmers are usually loathe to deal with issues that are not directly related to the piece of code or technology that they are working on. Successful businesses know that good processes lead to continued success. The attributes that attract a business to an open source project are stability, reliability, and longevity. Stability gives a business the confidence to invest time into developing products on the project's platform, safe in the knowledge that the next incremental step in development won't be torpedoed by some unforeseen change. Reliability is often not associated with open source and many projects are perceived as being too cutting edge for a business to build upon. Longevity is of value as many businesses are inherently conservative in their approaches, attempting to reduce the risks of adopting any technique or technology. One way to reduce risk is to work with an open source project that has a proven track record of delivering quality products, on schedule. This article attempts to dispel the myth of the perceived tension between a formally run business and the apparently less formally run open source projects with which a business interacts. We describe how one particular open source project has developed processes which provide its users, customers, and partners with a product that is stable, reliable, and long lived.

How to Add Value to your Business with CEA: A Practical Approach - Daniel Cardenas (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Companies are always trying to differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack by applying different strategies such as improving customer service, increasing the efficiency of their operations, or reducing their costs. Most of the time, however, these goals are competing against each other for scarce resources, and managers often need to decide to concentrate on one. A small company can effectively and simultaneously accomplish these goals for a fraction of the cost by implementing communications-enabled business processes or solutions, which are a set of technology components that add real-time networking functionality to applications. One particular implementation of this framework is the one provided by Coral CEA. Coral CEA is a business ecosystem anchored around CEA functionalities that are offered as building blocks, out-of-the-box components that link the capabilities and intelligence of networks platforms with the power of current applications to provide a new set of features and functionalities. In this article, we show how a small company called Rezact, located in the ski resort town of Mont-Tremblant, Quebec, successfully implemented CEA capabilities within its own operations using Coral CEA services.

The Humanitarian FOSS Project - Ralph Morelli; Allen Tucker; Trishan R. de Lanerolle (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
The Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (Humanitarian FOSS) Project is primarily an educational project whose goal is to engage more undergraduates in building free and open source software (FOSS) that benefits their community. Over the past four years, increasing numbers of undergraduates and computer science programs have been inspired by the Humanitarian FOSS project to make significant contributions to several active open source software development projects that have benefited organizations such as the Portland, Maine Ronald McDonald House, and the New York City Salvation Army. This article provides examples of several Humanitarian FOSS projects and describes other initiatives aimed at promoting undergraduate education about FOSS and its application within the community.

Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software - Chamindra de Silva (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) represents the application of free and open source software (FOSS) to the coordination problems faced in the humanitarian and disaster-response domains. FOSS has found a natural home serving the humanitarian domain because of certain problem patterns that promote the use of an open source approach. HFOSS also integrates two volunteer-rich communities that have much in common: the humanitarian community and the open source community. HFOSS is not distinct from the free and open source approach, but is rather a specialization of its principles. This article explores and elaborates on that natural alignment by presenting the concepts of HFOSS and the ecosystem that sustains it.

IEEE Humanitarian Projects: Open Hardware for the Benefit of the Poorest Nations - Glenn McKnight; Alfredo Herrera (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
An opportunity to solve some of the pressing needs of impoverished nations may be effectively addressed by the active sharing of open hardware solutions. As other articles in this issue of the OSBR demonstrate, open source software is already being used as an effective technology to address humanitarian needs in developing countries. The adoption of open hardware, as an alternative to commercial off-the-shelf products, may be another effective solution to global development challenges. In this article, we will not discuss the socio-economic aspects inherent with global initiatives; but there is a need for meaningful dialogue to come up with appropriate and long-lasting solutions. The focus of this article is on one of the recent activities of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic engineers (IEEE): the Humanitarian Technology Challenge. The Challenge identified three humanitarian problems that could be solved through technology and challenged participants to find an open-source approach to tackle them. The challenges were Reliable Electricity, Data Connectivity, and Personal Identification Records. This article describes the work part of the Reliable Electricity challenge from three perspectives: i) that of the initial HTC Reliable Electricity team; ii) its offspring, called Community Solutions Initiatives (CSI); and iii) an IEEE Canada group called the Humanitarian Initiatives Committee. All of these groups are part of the IEEE.

Implementing a Deal Development Platform for Business Ecosystems - James Makienko; Leonard De Baets (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
This article describes a project to develop a platform that promotes transactions between customers and suppliers within a business ecosystem. A web-based platform is being developed to track customer interactions and manage the flow of deals through development stages. The solution will be implemented using an open source customer relationship management tool that will be customized to suit the particular needs of a business ecosystem.

Improving Product-Market Fit by Engaging an Open Source Community - Craig Fitzpatrick (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
While many commercial software vendors still balk at the idea of open source, producing and participating in open source software (OSS) projects can provide significant benefits to a company. One benefit is improving product-market fit. This article introduces the concept of product-market fit. It then provides an example of one startup's experience with opening a portion of their code. Finally, it discusses the importance of building community and some of the motivators of community participation.

Inspired by Open Source and CEAs: The Future of Collaborative Healthcare Delivery in Canada - Andrew Ceponkus (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Open source and communications enabled applications are emerging as a vital part of e-Health strategies across Canada. This article provides an overview of lessons learned from our investigation of collaborative telehealth systems delivery in Canadian healthcare. Specifically, the role of open source software and CEAs with respect to pan-Canadian patient record management and telehealth service prototyping are discussed.

Integrating Lessons from Other Disciplines into Open Source Practice - Mekki MacAulay (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Open source theory and practice is inherently interdisciplinary. Viewing the challenges faced by open source communities, businesses, and contributors through the lenses of different disciplines can yield novel solutions. This article reviews select lessons from the diverse fields of fashion, gaming, and scientometrics. It examines the way these other industries have addressed issues that are of relevance to the open source community and suggests ways to put these lessons to good use.

Integrating the Power of Open Source Telephony with Web 2.0 Technology - Jean-Pierre Poulin (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
For technology companies seeking to harness powerful open source technologies, few can argue against the usefulness of modern Web 2.0 platforms. Considering how ubiquitous the Internet has become, an entrepreneur would certainly be ill-advised to not use some Web 2.0 platform to facilitate access to Communication Enabled Applications. This article enumerates the lessons learned by one startup in order to demonstrate the need for a balanced approach to CEA to facilitate access to untapped markets.

Keystone: Adjective or Noun? - Michael Weiss (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
The gopher tortoise is an unassuming land animal that inhabits sandy regions of the southeastern United States. Like many other desert inhabitants it needs to seek shelter from the heat of the sun. Gopher tortoises are very adept at digging burrows in which they can hide during the peak hours of the day. These burrows offer shelter to many other species that are not able to dig underground. Without the burrows dug by tortoises many types of rodents and snakes would not be able to survive. The existence of the gopher tortoise in its ecosystem affects the health of many other species. The gopher tortoise is an example of a keystone species or keystone. As in biological ecosystems, some companies or institutions in business ecosystems are instrumental for the better well-being of others. They play the role of a keystone. In this article, we examine the question of what makes a keystone a keystone. We introduce two perspectives on that question: one provided by ecology, the other by network analysis. We then review how the term keystone is used by the literature on business ecosystems. Two lessons that readers should take from this article are that the keystone concept, as used by the majority of the business ecosystem literature, is not clearly articulated, and that there are many unresolved issues in applying the concept to business ecosystems.

Keystone Off-The-Shelf - Tony Bailetti (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
In this article, we describe the Keystone Off-The-Shelf (KOTS), a project to create a toolkit for platform owners. The toolkit will include everything that is required to operate a platform that supports a new approach to grow the revenue of small technology companies. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the KOTS project and the new approach to development and commercialization that it supports. We first describe the project's goal, objective, deliverables, and leadership. Next, we compare the new approach to development and commercialization that KOTS supports with two traditional approaches. We then identify the culture that best supports the new approach and provide an overview of the three key conceptual building blocks of this approach: integration of stakeholders' interests into development and commercialization decisions, value co-creation, and trust building. Finally, we provide the conclusions.

Low Cost Cellular Networks with OpenBTS - David Burgess (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
In mid-2007, Kestrel Signal Processing, Inc., a small software radio consulting shop in northern California, started writing an implementation of a GSM basestation. The initial developers were myself and Kestrel co-founder Harvind Samra. Our goal was to create a new kind of light-weight cellular network that could be built out inexpensively in remote and sparsely populated areas. Our software-radio GSM system, now called OpenBTS, was released publicly under the GPLv3 license in September 2008 and will be used in pilot deployments with small operators by the time this article goes to publication. This will probably be the first use of a free software basestation in a public cellular network, where both network operators and subscribers can download and read the full source code of the GSM protocol stack that connects their handsets to the rest of the world and where the operators will be free to modify the system to meet their specific needs. This article introduces the goals and evolution of the OpenBTS project.

Major Events: Good Economics and Exposure to the World - Bob Yates (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Major events of all kinds, especially sport events, are becoming a major element in the competitive arsenal of cities and and their economic development and tourism offices. Major events bring people to the city, provide attractions for residents, and ensure that the city's name is profiled in the national and international media. But they also can involve major infrastructure investment in facilities and amenities, some of which might have limited post-event utility. This article discusses some of the pros and cons of event hosting as an economic strategy and suggests some useful decision-making guidelines.

Mifos: Ending Poverty with Software - Adam Feuer (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Free and open source software (FOSS) and business are key elements for solving the largest problems facing humanity. In this article, we focus on the challenge of eradicating poverty, a significant economic condition that affects billions of people worldwide. We outline the role of microfinance - the use of small loans to help poor people establish businesses - in eliminating poverty. We then describe the Mifos Initiative, a FOSS project to provide banking software to support microfinance institutions. Although we focus on the specific case where software is being used to address the problem of poverty, the approach and lessons learned can be applied to other great problems facing humanity.

Migrating an Existing Business to a New Approach to Revenue Generation - Howard Rosenblum (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Traditional development and commercialization models take too long, cost too much, and expose founders to excessive risk. A new approach for small technology companies to generate revenue has been proposed by Bailetti. In the new approach, the top management team of a small technology company uses a a platform to co-create value by collaborating with all the stakeholders of its development and commercialization decisions and builds trust on its work practices and market offers. The purpose of this article is to provide the lessons learned from working with a top management team of a profitable business that uses a traditional approach to development and commercialization and wishes to migrate to the new approach. The article will be useful to managers and owners of existing small companies and vendor-neutral, non-profit organizations that wish to grow their businesses. The article is organized as follows. First, a hypothetical situation of a musical band illustrates the options available to a company that wishes to increase its revenue. This example is based on our work with a local technology. Next, we describe the lessons we learned while preparing the plan to migrate the existing company to the new approach to generate revenue. The hypothetical situation is used to illustrate the lessons learned. Finally, conclusions are provided.

A New Engine of Economic Development - Robert Poole (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
As our global economy shifts from one dominated by production to one based on knowledge, governments are looking for new ways to add value to the people they serve. Open Government initiatives have emerged as one response to these new economic realities. In this article, we discuss how the theory of a multi-sided stakeholder platform can be applied to create an innovative engine of regional economic development. We describe that engine, its parts, and the value that the participants realize from it.

Open is the New Closed: How the Mobile Industry uses Open Source to Further Commercial Agendas - Andreas Constantinou (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Openness is a much-misunderstood word. It represents a kind of good-will moniker to which people attach an impressive variety of definitions: open source code, open standards, open handsets, openness as in transparency, shared roadmaps, open application programming interfaces (APIs), open route to market, and so on. It is a very forgiving term as far as definitions go. One of the mobile industry's favourite facets of openness is open source code. Since 2007, tens of mobile industry giants and consortia have embraced open source in some form or other: the Symbian Foundation, LiMo Foundation, Google's Android, Nokia's Qt, Apple's WebKit and Nokia+Intel's Meego are the initiatives that have hit the industry front pages. On the surface, these initiatives use open source licenses, but that only tells half the story. Behind the scenes, Google, Apple, Nokia and others use restrictive governance models and control points that effectively detract the very freedoms that open source licensing is meant to bestow. This discusses the many forms that governance models can take, and how they are used in the mobile industry to tightly control the roadmap and application of open source projects.

Open Source Contributions as a Complement to Your Sales Strategy - Jason Côté; Julian Egelstaff (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Freeform Solutions, a not-for-profit IT consultancy, discovered a large portion of its work was being carried out without being paid for directly from consulting fees. This led to an investigation of the nature of such pro bono work, and what value it could provide to Freeform and its clients. Supporting open source communities was determined to be the most significant use of the time possible. Accordingly, Freeform has taken steps to focus a significant portion of its work on that task, and to integrate this work with its overall orientation to clients. This commitment to open source provides a strong differentiator in the marketplace. It also enables one kind of prioritization of sales leads. Ultimately, the commitment to the work is considered the most important aspect of the work, rather than the specific kind of activities that are undertaken, or how they are paid for.

The Open Source Mobile Cloud: Delivering Next-Gen Mobile Apps and Systems - Hal Steger (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Cloud computing is gaining acceptance as an efficient and cost-effective architecture to deploy many types of systems. More recently, mobile cloud computing has entered the scene, as an important means to deliver mobile apps and data. This article discusses trends that are driving the adoption of the mobile cloud, important components of mobile cloud infrastructure, and the role of open source.

Open Source Partner Strategy: Are Your Core Businesses Aligned? - Susan Riekki-Odle (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Technology companies have historically viewed partnerships through myopic, one-way lenses, asking only: "What can this partner do for me?" This type of thinking is even more pervasive with channel sales partnerships, where technology vendors limit the exploration of value to short term revenue contribution. Vendors must broaden their scope and range of site when embarking on a path of partnership strategy. Ecosystem analysis, economic modeling, and creative go-to-market development are critical components of successful partnership strategies. This article discusses this critical business strategy through a real world example and an overview of best practice.

An Open Source Solution for Startups - William Stewart (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Can open source help startup companies reduce cost, save time, and improve their productivity? This article describes the experience of the startup Eseri which spent three years integrating the world's best open source software into a complete turn-key small to medium enterprise information technology solution. Eseri uses their own system to run the company. Having recently launched, they have targeted startups as their most important market segment.

Open Source User Assistance: Ensuring That Everybody Wins - Janet Swisher (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
This article describes the importance of user assistance to the success of open source projects and offers some suggestions on fostering community contributions to open source user assistance. The term "user assistance" encompasses all the ways that users get help in figuring out how to use a product, spanning the traditional categories of both documentation and support. User assistance provides opportunities for participation by community members who are not software developers. This in turn relieves the burden on developers for filling these roles while broadening the community. Projects should support the differing motivations of members in these roles while providing leadership and direction, removing barriers to contribution, and engaging in concerted efforts. Licensing for open source documentation should likewise be open, to support user freedom and foster community collaboration. Leaders in open source user assistance need to share ideas across projects in order to improve their offerings.

Open to Everyone: How Open Source Communities Can Benefit from Diversity Without Disunity - Teresa Jewell (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Open source is at once a type of software licensing, a community model, an ideology, and a social movement. As a movement aiming not only to promote open source software within the software development community, but also to change the attitudes of commercial users, it can benefit from lessons learned by earlier social movements. This article is intended for entrepreneurs, developers, and open source proponents who wish to maximize the market for their products. It will begin with a discussion of the successful strategies and common pitfalls of the feminist movement. It will then apply these lessons to the open source community. Overall, it will discuss the importance of united ideologies, inclusive communities, and the pursuit of legislative changes in promoting open source software as a viable alternative to traditional proprietary software.

OpenOttawaLibre: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Building Creative Cities - Michael Ayukawa; Julie Dupont (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
OpenOttawaLibre (OOL) is a multidisciplinary approach that is being developed to strengthen Ottawa's position as a creative city. Faced with stiff competition from globally dominant mega-centres, smaller cities like Ottawa can compensate for their size by actively bringing together people to exchange ideas, share perspectives, and form new partnerships to solve existing and emerging problems. OOL will make it easy to organize these events and lower the risk by developing an ecosystem with experienced facilitators, physical resources, and proven processes. OOL is anchored by Ottawa's cultural planning group and aims to make Ottawa a global magnet for creative industries and talent.

Ottercall: A Language Learning Company - Elias Majic (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Using computer-assisted speech recognition to evaluate the pronunciation of a speaker, Ottercall provides its customers with feedback on how to improve their language skills. In this article, Ottercall's plan to enter a crowded competitive environment will be described. The article first describes the language-learning market and the points of difference between existing solutions. Next, it will outline the various strategies and decisions considered by Ottercall in developing its market entry strategy. Finally, the lessons learned through this process will be shared.

Performance Testing From the Cloud - Tom Lounibos (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
This article discusses the opportunities and challenges when leveraging the cloud to performance test large-scale websites and applications. Getting performance right, particularly at web-scale, requires a level of passion that results in both a view of the big picture and an attention to detail. We'll describe how to use the scale of the cloud to gain confidence when deploying sites servicing potentially massive amounts of web traffic. We'll start by describing what we mean by the cloud in order to set context. We'll then describe the components that comprise SOASTA's CloudTest and focus on how we deliver the offering to the market, including a look at the key tenets of the cloud testing methodology based on SOASTA's experiences.

Plumbing the Internet with PostgreSQL: An Open Source Case Study - Ram Mohan (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
It's no secret that open source software can offer substantial cost savings to startup companies. Anybody with an idea and a limited amount of capital can launch a web-based business and scale it relatively quickly using a simple and robust LAMP infrastructure. But what about startup companies contracted to provide crucial parts of the Internet's plumbing, such as a domain name registry? This article describes how registry manager Afilias deployed open source, particularly the PostgreSQL database management software, at the core of its business from the very outset, allowing it to scale as business grew. It also underlines the importance of actively engaging with the open source community in order to get the most out of your investment.

Private Clouds: Reality or Fog? - Ronald Schmelzer (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Product marketers love a bandwagon, and no bandwagons have been more appealing in the past ten years of information technology as the Service Oriented Architecture and Cloud Computing ones. Much of the challenge of marketing products is getting the attention of the target customer in order to create an opportunity to pitch products or services to them. Of course, if it doesn't work with one bandwagon, as the old adage goes, try, try again. This is why we often see the same products marketed with different labels and categories applied to them. Product vendors will insist that they have developed some new add-on or tweaked a user interface to include the new concept, but at the very core, the products remain fundamentally unchanged. It is particularly frustrating when product marketing gets in the way of implementing what otherwise would be a valuable concept. Competing vendor, consultant, and individual implementer messages on what a specific term means interferes with realizing real value. This is especially the case with the emerging concept of private clouds. While the term could potentially have real meaning and lasting value, the product and consulting marketers have turned any potential meaning into mush that hides that value. Cloud computing is primarily loosely-coupled, location-independent virtualized services run on abstracted infrastructure with the primary intent of reducing IT expenditures, increasing flexibility, or improving overall system robustness. Given that this is the general cloud concept, is there any value in a new concept called "private clouds?" How does the addition of the word private add value to the service-oriented cloud computing that has been discussed for a handful of years? Is it a valuable term, or mere marketing spin? This article first examines the range of definitions being applied to the private cloud concept, then offers a summary on the value provided by private clouds.

Q&A. How can a community be considered "open source" if its primary objective is to promote commercialization? - Mike Milinkovich (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
How can a community be considered "open source" if its primary objective is to promote commercialization?

Q&A. How do you make money with open source? - Tarus Balog (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
How do you make money with open source?

Q&A. How do you motivate potential participants to pay to join a platform? - James Makienko (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
A company that operates a multi-sided platform must convince participants to pay an affiliation fee to access the platform. The challenge is to determine what it will take to motivate the participants to pay to collaborate with each other. To motivate participants to pay an affiliation fee, a multi-sided platform must deliver unique value to the various stakeholder groups its sides represent. For example, if a platform is designed to generate revenue from three stakeholder groups: developers, users and researchers, it must deliver unique value to each of these three groups. Developers must receive more value from participating in the platform than the value received from not participating in the platform. The same holds true for users and researchers. To generate revenue, a platform must be designed to deliver compelling value propositions for each stakeholder group. To illustrate how this can be achieved, we will describe five lessons learned while defining value propositions for a technology company.

Q&A. How is social network analysis used in studies of open source? - Chulaka Ailapperuma; Senthilkumar Mukunda; Shruti Satsangi (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Social network analysis (SNA) can be used to study online communities, including free/libre open source software (F/LOSS) developer teams. SNA techniques provide insight into these communities and enable researchers to make predictions based on these insights. They can be used to model the nature and patterns of interactions that can be used as a predictor of group behaviour, trust, knowledge generation, and information diffusion (Crowston et al., 2010). SNA can also be used make predictions about other kinds of networks other than pure social networks, such as networks based on relationships between code artifacts. In this article, we answer the question of how SNA has been used to study open source. We begin by describing social networks and how they can be deconstructed to examine the relationships between entities within them. Next, we discuss social networks within F/LOSS communities and describe how SNA gives insights into the various actors and groups acting within networks. Finally, we provide an overview of common SNA measures used to study open source, including examples of how they have been used to provide insights about F/LOSS communities.

Q&A. Should All Women Aspire to Be Entrepreneurs? - Cate Huston (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Many authors, in this issue of the OSBR and elsewhere, highlight the relative lack of women entrepreneurs and suggest ways that we can overcome the challenges women face so that we can increase the numbers. However, I wish to offer another perspective. I do not want to be an entrepreneur and I am not the only woman who feels this way. Here, I wish to highlight the importance filling gaps as a form of leadership. This alternative to entrepreneurship is valuable and is also in need of encouragement.

Q&A. What business models are currently used with open source software? - Thomas Prowse (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Over the past 15 years, I have seen OSS move from a technological novelty or curiosity to a key foundational element of our information economy. As a technology lawyer, I have found it fascinating to witness the parallel evolution of business models in this space. To answer this question, I will give a broad overview of some of the established and emerging OSS business models that companies, organizations, and individuals are currently using.

Q&A. Which is the better path to take, as a push or a pull startup? - Harley Finkelstein (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Which is the better path to take, as a push or a pull startup?

Q&A. Why Is There a Dearth of Women on High-Growth Technology Startup Teams? - Ruth Bastedo (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Through my work with women-led startups, I have come to the following conclusion: as an industry, we should be focusing on increasing the number of women on startup teams. We should be ensuring that women team members have an equity stake in the business and have meaningful leadership roles on the management teams. If a woman is President and CEO, that is wonderful, but I feel that it is even more important just to have women present and engaged. I believe that the diversity in viewpoint and life experience that women leaders bring to the table impact the performance of companies in a complex, global, and increasingly interconnected world. This is the world in which Canadian startups have to compete and thrive in order to boost our country's productivity levels. Women have to have a seat at the table, and by being there, have the potential to impact the success of Canadian startups.

Re-evaluating Open Source for Sustaining Competitive Advantage for Hosted Applications - Daniel Crenna (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
The use of open source in hosted solutions is undoubtedly widespread. However, it is seldom considered important in its own right, nor do the majority of hosted solutions providers contribute to or create open source as natural artifacts of doing good business. In this exploration of the nature of hosted solutions and their developers, it is suggested that not only consuming open source, but creating and disseminating it to collaborators and competitors alike, is essential to success. By establishing an open source ecosystem where hosted solutions compete on differentiation rather than lose time and money to concerns that are expected by users, do not add value, and benefit from public scrutiny, hosted solution providers can reduce the cost of their solution, the time it takes to deliver new ones, and improve their quality without additional resources.

The State of Free Software in Mobile Devices - Bradley M. Kuhn (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
I started using GNU/Linux and Free Software in 1992. In those days, while everything I needed for a working computer was generally available in software freedom, there were many components and applications that simply did not exist. For highly technical users who did not need many peripherals, the Free Software community had reached a state of complete software freedom. Yet, in 1992, everyone agreed there was still so much work to be done. Even today, we still strive for a desktop and server operating system, with all relevant applications, that grants complete software freedom. Looked at broadly, mobile telephone systems are not all that different from those 1992-era GNU/Linux systems. The basics are currently available as Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (F/LOSS). If you need only the bare minimum of functionality, you can, by picking the right phone hardware, run an almost completely F/LOSS operating system and application set. Yet, we have so far to go. This article discusses the current penetration of F/LOSS in mobile devices and offers a path forward for free software advocates.

Strategies for Selling Services - Patrick O'Halloran (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
With the service economy on the ascension, companies are yearning for mechanisms to connect their service solutions to their customer's problems, and have the customer acknowledge that their solution is the best. In order to meet these requirements, the foundations of the model used to deploy such solutions need to be concrete. The solution must capture the fundamental nature of the target markets and embody all of the customers' expectations. This article reviews literature that will inform the development of these models and identifies relevant strategies to enable growth options around service-based solutions.

Technical Entrepreneurs Benefit From Business Ecosystems - Tony Bailetti (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
The objective of this article is to highlight nine creative companies that are part of Lead to Win and describe how they benefit from this vendor-neutral business ecosystem. This paper is organized into three sections. The first section provides an overview on technical entrepreneurship, creative companies and business ecosystems. The second section describes nine startups located in Canada's National Region and identifies how their founders benefit from Lead to Win. The third section provides key takeaway messages about technical entrepreneurship and business ecosystems.

TriSano: Collaborating for the Good of Global Public Health - Mike Herrick (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Healthcare and public health continue to experience significant changes, driven primarily due to new legislation and economic challenges. These changes mean that those in healthcare and public health are under pressure to respond differently in order to meet the health needs of the population. Additionally, public health is collaborative, by nature. Epidemiologists, informaticians, public health officials, nurses, and doctors fluidly come together to prevent disease and protect the health of the global citizens. This article explores how collaboration and open source software helps healthcare and public health address their challenges across the globe. It is based on the experiences of the TriSano project from the past three years. It traces the history of the project and the refinement of its business model and product offerings to illustrate how collaboration based on a shared business vision with industry thought leaders leads to sustainable software and communities. Finally, insights are shared from working at the intersection of a humanitarian open source project and the business world.

The Value of Cloud Computing - David Linthicum (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
The movement to cloud computing is the disruptive change that information technology (IT) departments will soon face as cloud computing begins to have an effect on the modern enterprise. IT managers must learn how to give as well as take information in this new, shareable environment, while still protecting their company's interests. Innovative companies will take advantage of these new resources, such as cloud computing, and reinvent themselves as unstoppable forces in their markets. Those who don't take advantage of this revolution will become quickly outdated, perhaps out of business. This article will discuss what cloud is, and how it can potentially have value within your enterprise. Rather than a hype-driven view of cloud computing, this article will provide you with the guidance you need to get started defining the value of cloud computing.

What's the Value of an Eyeball? Passive Participation in Open Source Ecosystems - Mekki MacAulay (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Passive participants in open source ecosystems should not be viewed as leeches as they contribute value to the ecosystem. Every eyeball has value. By better understanding the roles of passive participants in the ecosystem, keystone companies can assign resources, such as community managers, more effectively and better leverage the value these participants create. The next challenge is to better quantify the value of passive contribution. This article discusses how passive participants in open source ecosystems play an important role in value creation in the ecosystem. It examines why the value they add is not well captured by current measures and suggests areas of future research, the outcomes of which would enable keystone companies to better position themselves.

When Small is Big: Microcredit and Economic Development - George Brown (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Microcredit - the extension of small loans - gives people who would otherwise not have access to credit the opportunity to begin or expand businesses or to pursue job-specific training. These borrowers lack the income, credit history, assets, or security to borrow from other sources. Although the popularity and success of microcredit in developing countries has been trumpeted in the media, microcredit is established and growing in the United States and Canada as well. Its appeal comes from its capacity to provide the means for those who have the ability, drive, and commitment to overcome the hurdles to self-sufficiency. In this article, the role of microcredit as a stimulant for economic development is examined. First, its importance for the establishment of small businesss is described. Second, the article provides an overview of the general microcredit climate in the United states and the local situation in the Ottawa area. Third, brief stories about individuals who have received this type of loan reveal the human impact behind the economic benefits. Finally, the role of microcredit in funding startups is analyzed in comparison to other sources of available funding. The article concludes with a summary of the benefits of microcredit as a win-win proposition for economic development.

Why Intellectual Property Will Not Save the Canadian Economy - David J. French (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Notwithstanding public statements by many individuals, obtaining intellectual property (IP) rights is not the objective that will allow Canadian industry to thrive in the future. The objective for each company should be identifying and delivering relevant innovations that will appeal to consumers and which will also survive in the high-pressure environment of world competition. Surviving in business in the future will increasingly become more of a challenge due to the increasing competence of foreign competitors. Establishing IP rights is a bonus that can make a few companies richer than they would otherwise have been. But most winners will succeed because of their focus on a consumer-based target objective - delivering customer-satisfying products at prices that will displace competitive alternatives - and not because of IP. Obtaining IP rights should not displace the focus from providing value to customers. To survive, that value should be sufficiently innovative so as to place companies ahead of competitors. Businesses will have to continue to innovate in order to stay ahead of competitors. If some businesses can acquire the comfort of meaningful IP protection, that will be a plus. However, a business has to have good fundamentals to survive and to thrive.

Youth Entrepreneurship: Ottawa's Portfolio in Talent Development - Sonia Riahi (Open Source Business Resource, 2010)
Youth's natural disposition for innovation and change make young people well suited for entrepreneurship, provided the community can give youth the right support to overcome their challenges and improve their odds of success. A city's economic development benefits from youth entrepreneurship in terms of employment creation, product and service innovation, market competition, community revitalization, and income generation. Youth entrepreneurs face greater challenges then adult entrepreneurs, and therefore would benefit from talent development programs to support them with skills, mentoring, networking, and access to resources in order to increase their rate of success. This article looks at the youth entrepreneurship programs available in Ottawa, examines how they rate, and identifies some opportunities for improvement in the delivery of programs.

The 100-Mile Client Roster - Emma Jane Hogbin (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
In 2005, two Canadians began a one-year experiment in eating only locally grown foods and started what is now known as The 100-Mile Diet. In the open source world, we know about giving back to our software community, but this is sometimes to the detriment of our physical community. It is hard to see the businesses around us when so many interactions take place online and in the digital neighbourhood. The world has gotten smaller in the last hundred years and products made on the other side of the world are common in businesses and households. As we muddle through our current economic crisis, we are encouraged to support our neighbours, their jobs, and to "buy local." Many household repair services must be locally obtained, but this is not necessarily true for software-related services. Many businesses are choosing to outsource the production of software and related support services to a cheaper labour force in other countries. As consumers, we know that buying locally often costs a premium; we also know it supports our neighbours and recycles our money back into our own physical community. This article examines the importance of giving back to the local community. It uncovers ways for businesses to expand and gain new revenue streams when they focus on open source software and use open business models.

Accelerating Successful Technical Entrepreneurship - Peter Carbone (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Technical entrepreneurship is often associated with innovation, research and invention. However, the motivation for entrepreneurship is the creation of wealth and commercialization of an idea. Wide scale disruptions in the economy, consolidations in industry, and the shift in value towards applications and applied technology create new challenges for the entrepreneur and the need for new business approaches to commercialization. Business ecosystems can effectively address these challenges. This article describes Coral CEA, the keystone of a worldwide ecosystem anchored around the commercialization of communication enabled applications. The vision of Coral CEA is to create new companies and knowledge jobs by implementing new commercialization models and driving massive innovation that is linked to commercialization.

Applied Collaboration Studios: Transforming Complex Problems into Systems of Continuous Social Innovation - Stephen Huddart; Anil Patel (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
This paper asserts that the voluntary or social sector plays a pivotal role in generating and disseminating social innovations through collaboration with diverse partners. The authors explore the potential to engender a quantum shift in the sector's efficiency, reach, and impact through the combined use of open source technologies, social process tools and collaboration platforms. The objective is to contribute to a new generation of intelligent social systems, enabling an evolutionary recalibration of relationships among ourselves, our social and economic institutions, and the planet. As a means of integrating and disseminating the most promising approaches, the concept of Applied Collaboration Studios is proposed. Its primary activities would be: i) dissemination of open source technologies; ii) ongoing instruction and coaching in the use of social process tools; iii) the assembly and launch of multiple collaboration platforms; and iv) collaboration with other like initiatives to create ecologies of scale that inform and precipitate systems change toward greater resilience. The paper concludes with a reflection on the conditions necessary for such a project to come into being as an open source initiative, and an invitation to contribute to an ongoing discussion.

The Arrival of the Mobile Internet Thanks to the Economics of Open Source Software - Stephen R. Walli (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The promise of the mobile Internet has been long in coming. In 1992, then Apple CEO John Sculley was promising this "pocket-sized digital communicating devices" market would be "the mother of all markets", while Intel CEO Andrew Grove called it "a pipe dream driven by greed." Since then the mobile phone business has exploded, and personal digital assistants like the Palm Pilot have burst onto the scene. The launch of the RIM Blackberry brought a real email interface to the PDA world. The World Wide Web itself continues to grow enormously, with Netcraft's December 2008 survey receiving responses from 186,727,854 websites. We are just now arriving at a convergence in the market that is 16 years in the making. Handset and PDA manufacturers, mobile network operators, chip manufacturers, and computer platform hardware and software vendors all collide with the economics of the Web, collaborative development, and open source software. Indeed, we are seeing a point in history in which the mobile handset manufacturers and their partners are using open source software and collaborative development to ensure they do not get trapped in the narrow margin price war that caught the personal computer original equipment manufacturers in the previous technology wave.

The Benefits to ISVs of Working with Large Enterprise Consumers on Open-Source Projects - Kingston Duffie (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Selling software to consumers is tough as they want perfection and expect to pay nothing. Consumers are fickle and the competition can be fierce. By comparison, large enterprises have big problems and buckets of money to spend on solutions, allowing you to focus your marketing on a small target. While large enterprises sound like ideal customers, the small independent software vendor selling to a large enterprise faces long sales cycles, extreme quality expectations, challenges integrating into a complex jungle of pre-existing systems, and the need to partner with others to create a complete solution. At Fanfare, we believe that there are a variety of successful software business models that employ open source strategies. One such strategy is to sell closed source solutions constructed on top of an open source platform. In fact, the Eclipse Foundation considers enabling this kind of business model as one of its mandates. We sell a complete system test automation solution that is built on top of Eclipse and sold to customers as a "turnkey" solution using Eclipse's Rich Client Platform technology. In this article, we examine six benefits of this approach. Some of these benefits apply to any ISV, but many are specific advantages for ISVs selling into large enterprises.

BIRT: Building Next Generation BI Using Open Source - Tom Bondur; Jason Weathersby (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools Project is a highly successful open source business intelligence (BI) project developed and released as part of the Eclipse ecosystem. In this article, we look at the genesis of the BIRT project, why Actuate chose the open source development model, and the benefits that this project brings to the BI user community.

BSD Advocacy and Breaking Through Market Barriers - Melanie Groves VonFange (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Currently, proprietary businesses dominate the operating systems market. In 2008, Microsoft Windows controlled 87.9% of the market with Mac OS X following up with 9.73%, leaving only 2.37% of the market to open source alternatives. However, in the past year alone, Linux market share has grown from .80% to 1.02% (a 27.5% increase) and other open source operating systems have grown from .22% to .58% (a 163% increase). These figures translate into millions of open source operating system users. The question is how to continue these upward trends and break the stranglehold that proprietary operating systems have on the markets. This article discusses the role that open source advocacy plays in increasing open source usage.

Business Intelligence: A Primer - John Kemp; Benjamin Dietz (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
This article provides a primer on business intelligence (BI) and serves as an introduction to the concepts used throughout the rest of the articles in this issue of the OSBR. We define BI, discuss the components of a BI solution, explain the types of BI tools and provide a brief overview of the evolution of BI.

Co-creation: a New Way of Doing Business in an Age of Uncertainty - Anna Kirah (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Co-creation can be defined as the continual feedback loop and collaboration with all stakeholders in a value chain throughout any given process of designing, developing and implementing meaningful products, services, organizational and strategic changes. It replaces the hierarchical approach to management and the linear approach to innovation, affording all stakeholders the possibility to influence and bring forth meaningful and relevant solutions in a collaborative environment. Co-creation results in the development of goods, services and experiences that are uniquely designed to meet people's particular needs, values, meaning and context. It leads to a profitable advantage for both companies and the people who will be using these goods and services as well as for the people working within the organizations. The purpose of this article is to share some experience -driven insights on how co-creation could help businesses to live in an age of uncertainty.

Collaborating Across Disciplines - Joseph Wilson (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Anecdotal evidence suggests that truly innovative ideas and successful adaptation to market conditions comes from collaboration with people across traditionally demarcated fields of study. In science, economics, and business, it is new ideas that are imported from other realms that are most successful in affecting change. The Treehouse Group is a Toronto-based collective of thinkers from a wide variety of backgrounds that seek to subvert the traditional notion of what constitutes a conference or a networking opportunity by using a wide variety of brainstorming techniques and cross-disciplinary activities to engage participants.

Collaborative Software Development in the Enterprise - Ian Skerrett (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Open source has been many things to many people. In most cases, open source software has focused on the tools and the infrastructure software used to build and deploy applications. Relative to infrastructure, little use or investment has occurred in the development of industry specific or vertical oriented open source solutions. This is not only a missed opportunity for organizations, but it is also possibly the next wave of open source collaborations. An important lesson of OSS is a development process that requires collaboration between individuals and organizations that isn't necessarily driven by a traditional hierarchy of command and control. Information technology departments are driven to be more efficient while simultaneously creating innovative new solutions to meet their business needs. More and more, companies are turning to external sources for ideas that drive innovation. A series of books by Henry Chesbrough has coined the term "innovation networks" to discuss research and development departments that treat their research and development systems as an open system. They describe how to include partners, customers and even competitors as part of an extended research and development team. However, that series does not answer the question "can OSS can be used to establish innovation networks for IT departments?". Further, what steps are required to establish a successful software innovation network and what are the resulting benefits for organizations? For the most part, this article will draw upon the experiences of Eclipse open source projects. These projects often include competing independent software vendors that collaborate on building a common platform for developer tools integration.

Community-Built Software: What I Learned from Calagator - Audrey Eschright (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Many open source projects start with a single developer trying to scratch an itch by making a new tool for their own use. But what if the need to be addressed is bigger, and affects more people? How can the creation of open source software involve a whole community? At the start of 2008 I decided to build a solution to an ongoing problem in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. Portland's growing technology scene was having trouble tracking all of the user groups, meetups, and events that people were planning. I started a central calendar using Google Calendar, but found it hard to maintain. People planning the events needed the ability to make their own updates without me having to add them individually as users. A single, central information source that would be completely open to the community at large was needed. The solution became an open-source calendar aggregator called Calagator. The process of creating that solution became a very rewarding community-building effort. By trying different things along the way, we learned how to organize an open source project to encourage community development, and code sprint practices for group work sessions, and worked with a number of tools that make collaboration easier.

Components of Co-creation - Stephen Allen; Tony Bailetti; Stoyan Tanev (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Value co-creation is an emerging innovation, marketing and business paradigm describing how customers and users are seen as active participants in the design of personalized products, services and experiences. Often this participation is organised via the Internet to enable the opportunity for customers to integrate their knowledge, experience and skills into existing, modified or entirely new market offerings reflecting their personal preferences, needs and contexts. There is a growing body of literature dedicated to the discussion of value co-creation frameworks, mechanisms and processes. However, these typically focus on the study, discussion and analysis of a small number of cases using deep, ethnographic description of their practices aiming at conceptualization and categorization of the different types of interactions between end users, the firm and the value network. Although useful, such an approach misses the advantages of an empirically driven quantitative approach that benefits from larger size samples and is more appropriate for theory building through the development and testing of hypotheses. It is important, therefore, to seek the development of a research methodology that combines the benefits of both qualitative and quantitative research approaches for studying the nature of value co-creation. The article provides a first attempt to identify the main research steps of such a methodology. It provides some preliminary results on the key components of value co-creation between firms and end customers based on the application of web search and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) techniques. The analysis of these preliminary results is then used as an opportunity to identify a number of research questions to be addressed in future research. The emerging research questions follow the inner logic of the value co-creation phenomenon as well as the nature of the results reported in this article. The specific nature of the results was found to be suitable for the application of small-N techniques such as the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) technique which combines the advantages of both qualitative and quantitative techniques. One of the main contributions of this article is to suggest and explore the possibility for using the QCA technique in future research on value co-creation.

Developing a Portal for Open Source Creation: A Brief Study - Karen Opas-Lanouette (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
This article discusses the historic genesis of one company's development of a portal and platform system that enables creators and their fans to work collaboratively between different mediums such as sequential art, graphica, concept, gaming, film/TV, and music. We examine challenges that arose and which are common to many startups. These include the protection of the intellectual property rights (IPR) of all parties, using open source software development to develop the portal, and the financial and personal toll that arises over the course of a startup?s journey.

Economic Free Software Perspectives - Carlo Daffara (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
"How do you make money with free software?" was a very common question just a few years ago. Today, that question has evolved into "What are successful business strategies that can be implemented on top of free software?" To properly answer this question, it is important to distinguish between the legal, procedural and business model aspects of free/libre and open source software, and how those aspects interact. For example, the licensing aspect influences the development strategy, the kind of development community that can be created around a project, and the potential business models that can provide a monetization strategy for a company that is interested in adopting an open source project as part of the internal company strategy. This article provides the most recent results from the FLOSSMETRICS project and its recent survey of the business model of more than 200 open source companies.

Editorial: Arts & Media (October 2009) - Dru Lavigne; Anthony Whitehead (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The editorial theme for the October issue of the OSBR is arts and media. While code development is often described as an art form, it is less common to see a connection between traditional arts and open source. The articles in this issue explore that connection and the nascent possibilities for content creators, user communities, and entrepreneurs.

Editorial: Business Intelligence (September 2009) - Dru Lavigne; Sam Selim (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
For the past decade, traditional proprietary tools from Cognos, Business Objects, Microstrategy, Hyperion, Oracle and Informatica have dominated BI environments throughout North America and Europe. The larger the customer it seemed, the bigger their appetite for spending money on proprietary BI tools. BI vendors have made billions selling software to larger clients throughout North America, much of it in the form of multi-million dollar site licenses. Large customers continue to pay huge perpetual annual maintenance fees, usually 20+ % of the initial license cost. Costs for additional users and new features requiring additional license fees can quickly add up to 40% - 50% of the annual BI budget. This has caused many organizations to scrutinize and question the value of their ongoing BI software expenditures. In these challenging financial times, cost conscience CIOs and Directors around the world are looking for ways to reduce the ongoing costs of administering their BI program, and a large number of them are turning to open source BI tools.

Editorial: Collaboration (July 2009) - Dru Lavigne; Stephen Huddart (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The editorial theme for the July issue of the OSBR is "collaboration". While online collaboration has been a hallmark of open source software (OSS) communities, the articles in this issue demonstrate that open collaboration extends far beyond the creation of software. The authors discuss diverse collaboration opportunities including: brainstorming across disciplines, social innovation, aggregating non-profit donations, the green environment movement, open educational resources, introducing students to communities, and managing single-user software applications.

Editorial: Commercialization (February 2009) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The number of market offers that rely on open source to generate companies' revenues is increasing. Open source has transformed how we develop software, hardware, content, and scientific knowledge. It is now transforming how we commercialize the market offers that generate revenue for companies that rely on open source projects. Commercialization is the theme of the February issue of the OSBR. The focus is on how new market offers that use open source to make money.

Editorial: Enterprise Participation (January 2009) - Dru Lavigne; Donald Smith (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
In 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.

Editorial: Geospatial (March 2009) - Dru Lavigne; Dave McIlhagga (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The recent emergence of MapQuest, Google Earth, Garmin GPS, and many other modern geospatial products make it seem that mapping technologies are a relatively new component of today's information technologies. In fact, the mapping industry was one of the original adopters of technology when geographic information systems were first developed over 40 years ago. The fruits of this backroom technology, once the domain of highly trained specialists, is now being leveraged by hundreds of millions, if not billions, of consumers around the world. Open source geospatial technologies have followed this same path from niche technology to mainstream component and are now critical to many of the applications that business and consumers use on a daily basis. Google Earth, for instance, incorporates a critical component of the open source geospatial stack to deliver satellite imagery to several hundred million installations around the planet. In the following articles, you will learn more about how these critical niche technologies have evolved from small grassroots activities to thriving technology projects under the umbrella of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, and ultimately into key commercial components of industry.

Editorial: Open APIs (April 2009) - Dru Lavigne; Michael Weiss (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
A few short years ago, the term "Internet" reflected the technical savvy sitting at a workstation reading email or using a search engine to find data. Today, people of all ages are using all manner of devices to: obtain public transit directions with Google Maps, share photos using Flickr and videos using YouTube, Tweet their whereabouts, meet new friends through Facebook, and perform countless other activities which have quickly become ubiquitous to every day life. This new generation of online activities is the result of open APIs, mashups, and rich Internet applications. These concepts are the focus of the April issue of the OSBR. The authors have done an excellent job of taking the editorial theme of "Open APIs" from the mysterious realm of programming into their applicability to daily life and business.

Editorial: Open Source in Government (May 2009) - Dru Lavigne; James Bowen (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Last summer, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published the sixth update to their Open Source Policy survey. The survey "tracks governmental policies on the use of open source software as reported in the press or other media." The report lists 275 open source policy initiatives. It also breaks down by country and by government level whether the policy on the use of open source is considered to be advisory, preferential, or mandatory. The editorial theme for the May issue of the OSBR is "open source in government" and we are pleased that the authors have drawn upon their experiences to provide insight into public policy regarding open source for many parts of the world.

Editorial: Tech Entrepreneurship (August 2009) - Dru Lavigne; David Hudson (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Entrepreneurship is the lifeblood of any technology business and really describes the character of those who would see their new ideas achieve commercial success. That character includes: risk taking and the ability to deal with uncertainty from many quarters, creativity and the ability to connect ideas in surprising ways, orchestration and the ability to marshal resources, and the ability to deliver a message with impact whether in the proverbial elevator or when the customer is listening to best and final offers. There is so much required of an entrepreneur, in some ways it is surprising that we have any at all. I've recently had the opportunity to witness a wide variety of entrepreneurs in action through the Lead to Win program. Lead to Win was started to assist innovation and entrepreneurship in the Canadian National Capital region. The program is certainly a response to the economic times and recognizes that when the tech sector is depressed, people who might otherwise find employment in established companies are more likely to start a business of their own. Lead to Win is designed to help entrepreneurs who have a deep technology background but need help building out some of the other dimensions of that entrepreneurial character. It has been a great pleasure to discover that the demand for Lead to Win has exceeded our expectations easily by a factor of two or three. The diversity of people, technologies and market opportunities that have come forward in what is often described as a government and telecom town is extremely encouraging. The patterns and themes in this diversity have the prospect of tapping into existing ecosystems and creating entirely new ones. This notion of entrepreneurship and how it unfolds in established and new fabrics of companies and customers is the centerpiece of this month's issue of the OSBR. Successful entrepreneurs do not exist in isolation and are able to see massive opportunity by leveraging those around them.

Editorial: Value Co-Creation (December 2009) - Dru Lavigne; Stoyan Tanev (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The December issue of the OSBR continues our discussion on the topic of value co-creation. According to Prahalad and Krishnan, most of the succesful companies in 2015 will be using value co-creation practices and companies that do not make the efforts to adopt such practices will soon lack a serious competitive advantage. Business models based on value co-creation are not simply adopting a new possible way of doing business. Value co-creation business models follow the way society goes and missing this tendency might be critical for businesses. The key danger is to try seeing value co-creation within the context of our old thinking. This is an easy human mistake that could lead to the wrong questions to answer. In exploring value co-creation, we have not discussed all the possible answers, but have set a stage for finding the right questions.

Editorial: Value Co-Creation (November 2009) - Dru Lavigne; Stoyan Tanev (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The relationship between companies that produce and distribute goods and the consumers who purchase and use those goods is often portrayed as "us vs. them". While technology provides the tools needed for communication and collaboration, company-consumer collaboration is often met with skepticism. Is it possible for companies and the users of their products to form mutually beneficial relationships that create value? The concept of value co-creation attempts to answer that question and it is the editorial theme of the November and December issues of the OSBR. Co-creation: New pathways to value reminds us that "It is...the quality of the relationship that companies form with and facilitate among their customers, which will determine how knowledge is created, shared and transferred". The authors in this issue introduce us to who is involved in these relationships, their motivations, and techniques.

Editorial: Women in Open Source (June 2009) - Dru Lavigne; Rikki Kite (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Whether you look at industry studies, online articles, or perhaps even around your own company, you'll see that women make up a small percent of the people working in free/libre and open source software (F/LOSS). Over the years there's been a growing interest in why so few women participate in this rapidly growing community and, more importantly, what can be done to help encourage more participation. Fortunately, members of the community - both male and female - are actively ramping up their efforts to attract more women to the F/LOSS community. Resources such as LinuxChix.org, the Geek Feminism Wiki, as well as publications, blogs, and articles written by and about women, draw attention to this growing, influential group of F/LOSS participants. Events, such as the Women in Open Source track at the Southern California Linux Expo, help women network and connect with other members of the F/LOSS community, while also increasing their visibility. In this issue of the Open Source Business Resource, innovative, energetic women discuss their specific projects, what other women in the field are doing, and their efforts to promote F/LOSS to people within their communities and internationally.

The Emerging Promise of Business EcoSystems - Peter Carbone (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
This article highlights the relevance of new business models and ecosystems in the knowledge-era economy. We begin with an introduction then argue that the shift in what is valued drives the need for new business models. The third section provides examples of innovative business models. The fourth section describes two key roles in an ecosystem: keystone and niche player. Finally, the last section provides the conclusions of this article.

Enabling Geospatial Business Intelligence - Thierry Badard; Etienne Dubé (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Recently, interest in the huge potential of Geospatial BI has increased. It aims at combining geographic information system (GIS) and business intelligence (BI) technologies. Geospatial BI combines spatial analysis and map visualization with proven BI tools in order to better support the corporate data analysis process and to help companies make more informed decisions. BI is a business management term which refers to applications and technologies that are used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information about company operations. BI applications are usually used to better understand historical, current and future aspects of business operations. BI applications typically offer ways to mine database- and spreadsheet-centric data to produce graphical, table-based and other types of analytics regarding business operations. BI systems give companies a more comprehensive knowledge of the factors affecting their business, such as metrics on sales, production, and internal operations, in order to to make better business decisions. Be aware that BI is a different from classical databases and much more complex. This article provides a rapid introduction to some important BI concepts. It then highlights the need for geospatial BI software and deals with the integration of the spatial component in a BI software stack in order to consistently enable geo-analytical tools. We then present different works performed and tools designed by the GeoSOA research group.

Enabling the Creative Entrepreneur: Business Ecosystems - Brian Hurley (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
To paraphrase John Donne, "no business is an island". Any business is part of a complex ecosystem that includes suppliers, customers, partners, and competitors. A successful business is able to leverage its connections within the ecosystem to its advantage. This article provides an overview of business ecosystems and how they provide opportunities for creative entrepreneurs to foster economic development and wealth creation.

Entrepreneurship in an Established Company - John Boden (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
There are some fundamental differences between how you go about being innovative in a startup and how you go about it when you have more than 350 customers in 75 countries already running their business on your product. Put another way, you have to approach entrepreneurship differently when you have over 2,000 active deployments serving 40 million people every day. We faced that challenge at Movius Interactive Corporation. This article provides a description of how we took on the challenge of revitalizing innovation and entrepreneurship and how open source plays a part.

The Expanding Role of Entrepreneurs in the Creation and Development of Internet Ecosystems - Gordon Quinn (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Technology-based ecosystems are everywhere. Consumer Internet-based ecosystems are almost always very large scale entities because the Internet has few real boundaries. The center of these ecosystems is often a large company that is a household name and has played a significant role in creating, or at least shaping, the market segment its ecosystem serves. Because of this, Internet ecosystems are often thought of as the exclusive domains of large established companies. In the past that was typically the case, but tech entrepreneurs are now increasingly able to act as the driving force behind the creation of Internet-based ecosystems. Entrepreneurs are moving into the role of ecosystem creation and development, and the established big companies are evolving to a supporting role of ecosystem enabler, investor, and operator. This article will review and contrast the roles of tech entrepreneurs with the roles of large established Internet companies in the creation and development of consumer Internet ecosystems.

The Feds are Ready for a Change - Mike Gifford (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Canada is at the tipping point for acceptance of open source. Open source software and culture has reached a critical mass in the business world and it is also being actively deployed within the Canadian government. While open source has contributed outstanding code, its impacts are even more profound, raising core values of participation, co-operation and standardization. However, like many large institutions, there has been reluctance to modernize its official position regarding this approach to software development. There is still considerable investment in existing procurement practice and thousands of jobs and billions of dollars are being invested in old information technology (IT) solutions. This article discusses the global momentum in federal government departments to support open source as well as some of the problems with the federal government's procurement process. However, despite the problems and relatively slow adoption of open source technology, there is movement for adoption. Federal government policies may be lagging behind other G7 governments, but it is being implemented across the civil service. There are also many people within government, at all levels, who understand the advantages of using open source.

First Steps towards Mapping the Economy's Genome - Evan Andrews (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Companies are increasingly being pressured to be green, although it is not always clear what this means. Upon closer examination, the concept of green can be seen as an emergent quality of the interactions between many companies, many chemicals, and our environment - all driven by our collective purchases. This tangled web can be better understood with the right analysis methods, software, and data, but these resources are currently scarce and expensive. The intellectual capital companies need to navigate this landscape can be quickly dispersed if they encourage the construction of an open environmental infrastructure of tools and data. This article discusses the analysis methods, software, and data that can be used to help companies, the economy, and society become greener, faster.

F/LOSS is Commercial Software - David A. Wheeler (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Many people mistakenly use the term "commercial software" as if it was the opposite of Free/Libre Open Source Software (F/LOSS). This is in spite of: i) the rise in commercial development and support for F/LOSS; ii) the goal of most F/LOSS projects to incorporate improvements, which is actually a form of financial gain; iii) official definitions of "commercial item" that include F/LOSS; and iv) F/LOSS licenses and projects that clearly approve of commercial support. In reality, there are two types of commercial software: proprietary software and F/LOSS. This paper provides examples for each of the four points mentioned above, briefly notes some alternative terms, and ends with some conclusions, and explains why it is important to understand that F/LOSS software is almost always commercial.

Freely Licensed and Open Source Pipelines for Art Based Film and Media Production - Anthony Whitehead (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Given the number of free/libre and open source licensed tools, and the number of "no cost" applications at the fingertips of the artist/animator/film developer today, the ability to "create what you will" is now an option for everyone. The advent of affordable media development tools has opened up the world of media production to those who were previously locked out of the Hollywood studio system. Proprietary software including Adobe Creative Suite, Autodesk?s Maya, Nuke, After Effects, Final Draft, and a litany of other necessary tools creates a financial wall so high that ?will? cannot overcome it alone. In this article, we examine a standard pipeline from a birds-eye-view for anyone with a will to create an Indie film. Without breaking the bank, the entire pipeline is achievable using F/LOSS tools and content that is available under a creative commons license. This allows high quality media development for all. In many cases, these same tools are being used by the Hollywood elite.

Geospatial: An Open Source Microcosm - Paul Ramsey (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Open source has seen great success in general information processing, but does it have a future in vertical markets? In this article, we examine how geospatial open source provides an example of the market challenges of a mid-sized vertical market.

Geospatial Primer: in Search of the Next "Killer App" - Andrew Ross (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Soon after Codd wrote his paper on relational algebra in 1970, relational databases significantly changed the way people manage data. Today, relational databases are the workhorses of enterprise data storage. Similarly, imagine a world without email or the Internet. What will the next "killer app" or "killer service" look like? What kinds of attributes and features will it provide? In this article, we provide a primer on geospatial technology. We then explain possible reasons for growth in the geospatial industry, examine Ingres' geospatial project, and relate the material to learnings about open source as a protocol for business.

The GNOME Foundation Is All About People - Stormy Peters (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
As open source projects mature, they tend to join or create foundations which manage the project's financial and software assets, provide a marketing and legal entity, and sometimes help to set the direction of the project. As non-profit organizations, foundations have a specific structure defined by the jurisdiction in which they were formed. This structure typically includes a volunteer board of directors and sometimes paid staff such as a secretary or executive director. As Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, I am often asked "what do you do?". This article will introduce the structure of the GNOME project and its Foundation, describe how the Foundation works to support the GNOME project, and discuss the roles of the people within the GNOME Foundation.

Government Transparency via Open Data and Open Source - Jennifer Bell (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Industry analyst Gartner describes web services based on open government data as having a "greater potential effect on the ability to transform government than anything else in the Web 2.0 world". In his technology platform, Barack Obama has made groundbreaking promises related to increasing government accountability by: i) publishing data in open formats; and ii) using online tools to involve citizens in government decision making. These transformative ideas have not yet spread to politics in Canada. As citizens, we trust that money is being wisely spent on the systems that run our country. We trust that the people governing us have the skills, time, and information they need to make the best decisions. We trust that bureaucracies are well-designed and that the people in them are motivated to make those bureaucracies better. Unfortunately, it's hard to trust what you can't see. By publishing information in open, machine-readable formats, governments can take a powerful step towards building public trust. By sharing information, governments can start to channel the expertise of the citizenry outside of the civil service to build more effective and inclusive ways of running the country. The non-profit VisibleGovernment.ca is working to make online tools for civic participation based on open government data a reality in Canada. This article describes why open government data is not only a requirement for greater government transparency, but also a valuable investment in our country's infrastructure.

How Companies Make Money Through Involvement in Open Source Hardware Projects - Edy Ferreira; Stoyan Tanev (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The study of open source software (OSS) development and business strategies has become the subject of significant research interest. However, there is little research on business models associated with the development of open source assets other than software such as hardware or content. This article provides an overview of current business models for creating revenue for both open source software and hardware. It then summarizes our research of market offers to identify the ways companies use open source hardware (OSH) projects to make money. The research results provide insights about the dimensions of open source business models in an area other than typical software development.

How Open Source Strengthens Business Models - Tony Bailetti (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
For a company's commercialization efforts to succeed, it needs to come up with great market offers which have great business models. Open source (OS) is neither a business model nor a market offer. A market offer with a weak business model will derive little benefit from OS regardless of how good the OS may be. Little is known about how OS strengthens the business model of a company's market offer. This article provide a conceptual tool that can be used to capture, share and communicate the strength of a company's business model and help articulate tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. The second half of the article provides many examples that show how OS strengthens a company's business model. This paper is relevant to: i) top management teams who must formulate their companies' business models clearly and communicate what is expected from OS; ii) top management teams who are considering investing in OS projects, participating in OS development, or influencing schedules and priorities of OS projects; iii) staff of OS foundations who must attract company investment and participation in their OS projects; and iv) academics who undertake research in the alignment of product development and OS evolution for the purpose of improving business performance

The Human Factor in Open Source - Cat Allman (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
It is easy to focus on the purely technical side of engineering: design, coding, documentation, licensing issues, and the release process. The interpersonal aspects of engineering also have a vital part to play. An important and frequently overlooked part of the successful free/libre and open source enterprise are the soft skills of communication, administration, and relationship building. Google uses, creates and supports open source software both as the raw material of code, and as a development model. My work in the Open Source Programs Office at Google as one member of a three person Outreach team is almost entirely about the mechanics of building good relations between the F/LOSS community at large and Google. This article describes our day-to-day tasks which are variously focused on student programs, external communications, event management, and financial administration.

An International Look at Women in Open Source - Cathy Malmrose (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
When attending conferences, working with various open source teams, and generally interacting with people in the open source world, we see women as a small representative minority. The disparity leaves us wondering: "How to activate the other 50% of the population?". The question, "How do we include more women?" has been asked many times and answered in many ways. Cathy Malmrose, CEO of ZaReason, a Linux hardware company, stated, "possibly the most immediately effective solution is to showcase women internationally and their contributions. By simply talking about what women are doing all over the world, it creates an atmosphere of acceptance, encouraging more women to try contributing, no matter where they are located or what their situation is. Our goal is to normalize the experience of having women on open source projects". This issue of OSBR is a powerful effort to do just that. This article provides a glance at women in open source internationally. It is by no means comprehensive and is based solely on a random sampling of women who are currently contributing. The goal of this article is to give you a sense of the breadth and depth of women contributing to open source.

An Introduction to Open APIs - TIM Program (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
This article provides a glossary of terms associated with open APIs which can serve as an introduction to the other articles in this issue of the OSBR. We conclude with some additional resources, video and text, which present further thoughts on the business value inherent in open APIs.

Lessons on Community Management from the Open Source World - Angela Byron (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
From the outside (and often times from within, too), the success of healthy open source projects defies all logic. Scores of individuals from all over the world, all of whom have different skill levels, use cases, and experience, not to mention native languages and time zones, collaborate together in order to help make a project succeed. How is it that all of this chaos comes together and creates something wonderful and useful? And moreover, what lessons can be taken from how open source projects work "on the ground" and applied to our practical, daily lives and organizations? This article will attempt to extrapolate some of the experience gleaned from being immersed for over four years in the Drupal project. Drupal is an open source website building tool which has transformed from a small hobby project in 1999 to a robust framework powering hundreds of thousands of websites today. But behind buzzwords like "social publishing" and "content management framework" there lies a diverse, passionate, and vibrant global community. We present some of the key ingredients to the community's success, many of which can be applied to any organization.

Licensing of Open APIs - G.R. Gangadharan (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Two major trends in software development today are the open source paradigm and the notion of software as a service. The combination of these has lead to the concept of open APIs and mashups. Since late 2005, there has been a rapid proliferation of applications, referred to as mashups, that combine data and services provided by third parties through open APIs with data sources owned by users. Open APIs give users access to the data or services of an information technology platform. A well-known example is the Google Maps API, which generates maps for a given location, whose output can be combined with other data and services into mashups. Combining services and data from multiple sources raises several issues related to intellectual rights in mashups. However, the concept of mashups is currently in a nascent stage, and service and data providers often underestimate the relevance of these issues. In this paper we give an overview of open API licensing and provide examples from current open APIs. We then briefly discuss licensing of open APIs.

Mapping Mashup Ecosystems - Michael Weiss (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Mashups enable, users to "mix and match" data and user interface elements from different online information sources to create new applications. The creation of mashups is supported by a complex ecosystem of interconnected data providers, mashup platforms, and users. In our recent research, we examined the structure of the mashup ecosystem and its growth over time. The main contribution of our research is a method for the analysis of mashup ecosystems. Its novelty lies in the development of techniques for mapping the mashup ecosystem, and the use of network analysis to obtain key characteristics of the ecosystem and identify significant ecosystem members and their relationships. In this paper, we summarize the key steps of our analysis method, describe the members of the mashup ecosystem, and discuss the managerial implications of our analysis.

Measuring Modularity in Open Source Code Bases - Steven Muegge; Roberto Milev (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Modularity of an open source software code base has been associated with growth of the software development community, the incentives for voluntary code contribution, and a reduction in the number of users who take code without contributing back to the community. As a theoretical construct, modularity links OSS to other domains of research, including organization theory, the economics of industry structure, and new product development. However, measuring the modularity of an OSS design has proven difficult, especially for large and complex systems. In this article, we describe some preliminary results of recent research at Carleton University that examines the evolving modularity of large-scale software systems. We describe a measurement method and a new modularity metric for comparing code bases of different size, introduce an open source toolkit that implements this method and metric, and provide an analysis of the evolution of the Apache Tomcat application server as an illustrative example of the insights gained from this approach. Although these results are preliminary, they open the door to further cross-discipline research that quantitatively links the concerns of business managers, entrepreneurs, policy-makers, and open source software developers.

The Micro- and Macro-levels of Co-creation: How Transformations Change People's Preferences - Tore Kristensen (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Radical technologies can lead to extreme transformations of their users and even societies. Innovation researchers, archeologists, economic- and technological historians, and other scholars have studied past radical innovations to rationalize how these innovations emerged. This knowledge is indispensible for business and governmental decision makers. However, most research studies lack the human dimensions, such as "what did these innovative people think?" and "what were their personal motivations?". In many instances, we don't even know who the inventors were. In this article, we argue that a better understanding of personal transformations may lead to an increase of co-creation effectiveness and efficiency. First, this article will explore the nature of the personal transformations taking place among ordinary people as consumers and users of cultural institutions. Such institutions have been created to enable people to learn and grow individually and to create a sense of community and cohesion. Second, we discuss the co-creation aspects of personal transformation processes. This will be seen in two contexts: that of the individual who is transformed, and in terms of the different value contributions to a community of users.

A Model for Sustainable Student Involvement in Community Open Source - Chris Tyler (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
A healthy community is the lifeblood of any open source project. Many open source contributors first get involved while they are students, but this is almost always on their own time. At Seneca College we have developed an approach to sustainably involving students in open source communities that has proven successful in a course setting. This paper outlines Seneca's approach and discusses the results that have been obtained with it. We will examine the key factors for successful student integration into open source communities and steps that educational institutions and open source projects can each take to improve student involvement.

Motivating Stakeholders for Co-created Innovation - Alex Pedrosa (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Today's profit orientation forces companies to focus on their core competencies and, at the same time, provide customers with multiple new offerings. To meet these two requirements, companies need to develop innovations in collaboration with different stakeholders including suppliers, customers, and users. While Managers and researchers discuss the benefits coming from the process of co-creating innovations with the various stakeholders, little is known about what motivates different stakeholders to engage in the co-creation of innovations. The purpose of this article is to highlight the first results of a qualitative study that focuses on the different types of value stakeholders can expect from co-creating innovations.

Offline: Where Tech Communities Succeed With Women - Selena Deckelmann (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Conferences are one way that women can be drawn into the free/libre and open source software ecosystem. Many different approaches are needed to increase women's participation in F/LOSS, but face-to-face interaction has proven to be a critical part of the way the technology community in Portland, Oregon has thrived. This article describes through anecdotes the successes of this community, and suggests how other communities could benefit from Portland's experience.

Open Source BI: A Market Overview - Steve Holub (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The following survey provides a list of open source software tools used in business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing systems. The tool selection criteria was based on the frequency and currency of the releases and on whether the product has released a stable build which could be used in a production environment. We only present those solutions which have had updates within the past two years. Our study looked at BI tools in the following categories: i) databases; ii) extract, transform, and load; iii) master data management; iv) BI reporting tools; and v) data mining. In the case of an open source software bundle that overlaps categories, we divide the software bundle into its separate parts for ease of categorization.

Open Source BI Reporting Tool Review - Benjamin Dietz; Lily Singh (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The main purpose of a business intelligence (BI) system is to provide access to information for decision makers. Reporting tools help to create, administer and distribute reports. Reports can be classified into three categories: i) standard reports containing information in table form; ii) cubes which are online analytical processing reports designed to analyze multidimensional data; and iii) dashboards which provide an overview of selected reports and key performance indicators. Each of these report types are often supplemented by graphical representations of the data. There are many different reporting solutions available in the open source market. In this article, we compare four open source reporting solutions. They give a good insight of the current state of the market and are among the the most popular solutions in use today.

Open Source Resources in Education: Opportunities and Challenges - Norm Friesen (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The education community has been at the forefront in envisioning and conceptualizing infrastructures intended for utilizing and sharing digital content or resources. However, this community has faced challenges in making these visions a reality. We begin by describing a relatively early attempt at creating an economy for sharing educational resources, referred to as learning objects. We then discuss two approaches to opening up educational contents to the world under the auspices of the more recent Open Educational Resources movement. One of these approaches has focused on creating open resources from scratch, utilizing Wiki content development and management technologies in the wake of the phenomenal success of Wikipedia. A second approach is represented by developments in Open Courseware. Following the example of MIT's Open Courseware, this approach has more recently been adopted by many other educational institutions under the OCW Consortium. We conclude by making the case that this second approach may represent the most promising of recent developments in the adaptation of open source and open content to educational practices and technologies.

Open Source: Shifting Buying and Evaluation Patterns of BI Users - John Kemp (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The emergence of open source software (OSS) has changed the buying patterns and approaches for the evaluation and selection of business intelligence (BI) tools. This article discusses how the buying patterns have changed and what it means for businesses looking at open source BI software.

Open Source Web Based Geospatial Processing with OMAR - Mark Lucas; Scott Bortman (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The availability of geospatial data sets is exploding. New satellites, aerial platforms, video feeds, global positioning system tagged digital photos, and traditional GIS information are dramatically increasing across the globe. These raw materials need to be dynamically processed, combined and correlated to generate value added information products to answer a wide range of questions. This article provides an overview of OMAR web based geospatial processing. OMAR is part of the Open Source Software Image Map project under the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. The primary contributors of OSSIM make their livings by providing professional services to US Government agencies and programs. OMAR provides one example that open source software solutions are increasingly being deployed in US government agencies. We will also summarize the capabilities of OMAR and its plans for near term development.

Opening the Source of Art - John Bell (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The open source community has developed a number of tools and philosophies to assist in distributed software development. The Still Water Lab at the University of Maine believes that these tools and philosophies can be adapted to facilitate other forms of distributed creative endeavours. It has developed two tools that reinterpret the ideas used in open source software through the lenses of artistic creation and preservation: The Pool and the Variable Media Questionnaire. This article discusses how several of the ideas used in software development have influenced Still Water's approach to making tools that support artistic production.

Q&A. How can an individual or small business give back to an open source community? - Mike Kavis (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
How can individual or small business give back to an open source community?

Q&A. What do investors look for in a business venture? - James Bowen (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)

Q&A. What lessons can "green" computing learn from open source? - Venkat Mangudi (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
What lessons can "green" computing learn from open source?

Q&A. What will Oracle do with Sun’s open source offerings? - Sam Selim (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Sam Selim answers the question "What will Oracle do with Sun?s open source offerings?"

Reassuring End Users Of Open Source: The OSGeo Example - Tyler Mitchell (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Furthering the adoption of open source software (OSS) is often seen as a natural, contagious progression as more developers and users share with others about the success of their projects. But how can an open source project even hope to compete with proprietary commercial products with massive marketing budgets and staff? Aside from not typically having large financial resources for marketing, other factors can lead enterprise users to look elsewhere for guarantees of product longevity and a robust support ecosystem around the product. Without these features, many users and businesses alike would not consider the software as an option or have a desire to become involved. This is equally true with open source geospatial software projects which are focused on presenting freely available mapping and geographic analysis tools to the world. The Open Source Geospatial Foundation seeks to address the needs mentioned above, to promote the excellent software that is available, and to provide a model where businesses can join in promotion and development. OSGeo undertook some novel approaches to encouraging new and existing support options which boosted confidence within the business sector by helping to ensure that project code will be publicly accessible for years to come. In this article, we discuss the factors needed to get open source geospatial products into the hands of those users willing to test, use and eventually admire them as their favourites, or to go one step further and recommend them as a corporate solution. We examine the advantages provided by using marketing to help promote open source projects and then consider how this can boost business confidence in the use of the software. The article closes with a look at how a natural ecosystem of open source users is able to create something bigger and more consequential than each project could attain on its own.

A RESTful Implementation of Geospatial Web Services - Haris Kurtagic; Geoff Zeiss (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
In "What is Web 2.0?" Tim O'Reilly identifies the characteristics that distinguish Web 2.0 from the first generation of Web applications. One key aspect is participation. Instead of users simply consuming information, Web 2.0 technology enables all of us to participate in building content. The power of Web 2.0, in Tim O?Reilly?s words, is that it provides a platform for "harnessing collective intelligence". Perhaps the best known example of this is Wikipedia, which is distinguished from other online encyclopedias by the fact that its content is provided by users rather than a small group of experts. This model has been so successful, even the Encyclopedia Britannica has adopted a Web 2.0 approach. A critical challenge to participation is interoperability--integrating the islands of technology that characterize most information technology organizations. There have been earlier attempts to create a standard framework for distributed computing such as CORBA and DCOM, but the complexity of these environments has limited their adoption. A more recent and simpler approach is Representational State Transfer (REST). In this article we begin with an examination of the critical challenges facing organizations responsible for maintaining our utility, telecommunications and transportation infrastructure, outline how open standards are helping to address these challenges, and then discuss how geospatial data and services can be exposed over the web. We introduce REST, outline a RESTful implementation of geospatial web services that provides simple and open access to geospatial data over the web using standard web protocols, and describe a prototype web site developed using RESTful web services by the City of Nanaimo.

The Role of Consumers Within an Open Source Community - Stormy Peters (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The software provided by the GNOME Project is produced by a large community comprised of several thousand developers, translators, quality assurance testers, and documentation writers. Consumers are represented in the community by technical users and organizations that distribute GNOME technologies. And while the community reaches out regularly to non-technical end users and welcomes any that approach the community, these two worlds rarely interact. This article draws upon our experience within the GNOME Project to examine the question "Why do consumers and the community rarely interact?". Our insights may prove useful for other projects and consumers wishing more interaction.

So Are You A Contributor?: Women's Contributions to Linux and Open Source Span Technology and Business - Amanda McPherson (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
While there are over 60 names on the list of women in open source on the Geek Feminism wiki, there are far more than 60 women making their mark in open source. I work with talented people every day in my role as Vice President of Marketing and Developer Programs at the Linux Foundation, and see first-hand the contributions women make at the technology and business levels. This article presents some of the techniques used by the Linux Foundation to encourage a culture of inclusion and to foster a wide variety of open source contributions.

So You Wanna be a Linus Torvalds? The Do's and Don'ts of Running a Small Open Source Project - Alain Désilets (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
In this paper, we present a series of lessons learned on how to effectively run a small open source community. These lessons are based on my own experience as the leader of VoiceCode, a project that aims at developing an integrated programming-by-voice toolbox. It provides tools that allow programmers with Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) to write computer code by talking to their machine instead of typing. The VoiceCode project started in 1999 by the National Research Council of Canada, and was first officially released in 2003. The system is now at a point where it can be used by programmers to do real work, and there have been over 9,100 downloads so far. The project has also attracted the attention of the media. In the process of leading this project, we have learned many important lessons; too many to discuss exhaustively here. We will however share three that seem particularly important.

Social Actions: Making the Web More Philanthropic - Peter Deitz; Christine Egger (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Social Actions makes it easier for people to turn their good intentions into meaningful action. The organization has created an open source database of actions people can take on any issue. The actions in the database come from across the social web and include everything from volunteer opportunities to micro credit loans. It currently aggregates opportunities to make a difference from 50+ action sources, including: CanadaHelps, Kiva, Idealist, GlobalGiving, GiveIndia, and Greater Good South Africa. Using the Social Actions application programming interface, we encourage third party developers to build web and mobile applications that intelligently distribute actions from our database on the websites, social networks, and mobile phones that millions of people use every day. This article describes how Social Actions applies open source principles to the organization's products and processes. In its entirety, Social Actions is intentionally designed to contribute to the ongoing and vibrant conversations about open source practices and principles.

Social Media and Open Source: Worlds Apart? - Aaran Duncan; Glenn McKnight (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Social Media, also known as Web 3.0, is not your granddaddy's Internet. How it is used is in a constant state of change. The rising tide of expectations, together with innovation, are pushing various platforms, especially in mobile technology. Mobile has become a compelling format to interface with the Internet, bringing a new spin to the phrase "One Laptop Left Behind". We believe that the degree to which open source communities embrace mobile and Social Media technologies dictates their relevance to the general public. We also believe that open source and Social Media communities can learn and benefit from each other. This article explores the increasingly intersecting worlds of Social Media, mobile, and open source. We describe how Social Media has the potential to change the way communities use and create open source tools to better align with end-user expectations.

A Social Vision for Value Co-creation in Design - Liz Sanders; George Simons (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The Cluetrain Manifesto was introduced in 1999, calling for a powerful global conversation between companies and the people they serve. Since then, the conversation has started and is finally gaining momentum. Co-creation is the buzzword of the day to describe the various types of conversations that are taking place. But the conversation has multiple perspectives. It can be applied to multiple domains ranging from sales tactics and branding contests to strategic, human-centered means of affecting social transformation. In this article we try to articulate a vision for value co-creation by focusing on its social aspects. It is our hope that such social vision will contribute to existing perspectives so that future conversations can take place in a more productive way. The suggested framework organizes the seemingly disparate applications, comparing the mindset, goals and results of three types of value co-creation: monetary, use/experience and social. Although these three types of value co-creation are all relevant, we believe that the social type of value provides a real opportunity for significant social change. However, the rules of engagement for this type of co-creation are particularly challenging. Participation must be face-to-face to allow for real-time interaction to take place. Empathy for the people who will be affected by change is key. Visualization of the collective assets is essential. And having the appropriate mindset about co-creation is the single most important component for success.

Special Considerations for Business Intelligence Projects - David Currie (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
A business intelligence (BI) project has to be managed with as much discipline as any other information technology (IT) project in order to be successful. There are a few items that need special consideration given the nature of BI solutions, regardless of the specific methodology or technology involved. This article will discuss how to extract maximum value from an investment in BI software.

The Steady March of the European Penguins - Gijs Hillenius (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Open source licenses allow public administrations to change, share and re-use their applications freely. Open standards allow for connectivity and interoperability between the applications. For a wider use of open source software by public administrations, it is equally important to require the use of open standards in the public sector. Open source projects can face difficulties when using proprietary standards, especially if these latter require usage royalties. The member states of the European Union made steady progress in 2008 in developing information technology policies on open source and open standards. Spain and France have taken the lead, yet in all EU member states examples of administrations using open source software can be found. Europe's competition commissioner Neelie Kroes warned the EU's institutions to follow suit and use open standards: "I know a smart business decision when I see one". This article provides an overview of the advancements and some of the setbacks of the implementation of open source and open standards by public administrations in the 27 member states of the European Union in 2008. It is mostly based on the news items the author wrote for the European Union's Open Source Observatory and Repository.

TellTable: Collaborative Work Using Single User Applications - Andy Adler; John C. Nash; Sylvie Noël (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Many work environments require collaborative writing and editing of documents in diverse formats. In simple cases, there is essentially one author who receives approvals and comments from others. In other cases, the document is genuinely collaboratively authored using asynchronous or synchronous methods. A common way to collaboratively edit a document is to exchange draft versions between authors via email. This method introduces the possibility of conflicting changes and missed contributions as well as a significant burden as all members of the team are responsible for version control. The principle difficulty is that independent changes can be made to different versions, which must later be reconciled manually. It is also difficult to determine when and why a change was made. This article introduces TellTable, an open source system designed to allow single-user software applications to be managed in a collaborative manner. We will discuss current collaboration models, the technical aspects of the TellTable software framework, security issues in its implementation, and tests of performance.

Torys Technology Law Speaker Series: Open Source Licenses and the Boundaries of Knowledge Production - Byron Thom (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law is Canada's premiere legal program in law and technology. The Torys Technology Law Speaker Series brings prominent speakers from around the world to discuss current topics in law and technology. A new approach to open source software was presented to students and faculty at the University of Ottawa on March 11, 2009. Michael Madison, Associate Dean for Research and Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, presented "Open Source Licenses and the Boundaries of Knowledge Production". Prof. Madison spent time outlining and answering questions on a novel interpretation of copyright in the age of OSS. Using historical examples, he called for the courts to incorporate a spatial framework to deal with open source licenses. His approach was particularly relevant and timely in light of a recent opinion from the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Jacobsen v. Katzer.

Transparency in Government - Darlene Meskell (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The focus of the Spring 2009 Intergovernmental Solutions Newsletter was Transparency and Open Government. The introductory article, republished here with permission, introduced the topic and the rest of the Newsletter. It provides an overview of current initiatives in both the United States and other parts of the world. Other articles from the Newsletter are referenced by page number.

Use of Moodle for Single Entry Portal at Riga Technical University - Tom Schmit; Zigmunds Zitmanis (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
This article discusses the reasons for the decision of Riga Technical University (RTU) in Latvia to choose an open source product as the application to create ORTUS. ORTUS is an acronym for Open Riga Technical University Services and provides the single point of entry into electronic services for the University.

Use of Open Source Software by the Brazilian Government - Edgy Paiva (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
In most countries, government initiatives that encourage the use of open source software are primarily motivated by the goal of reducing costs. In Brazil, the goal is different. According to Rog?rio Santanna, Secretary of Logistics and IT at the Brazilian Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management, "open source is a strategic choice of the Brazilian Federal Government since 2003 because it reduces costs, increases the competition, creates jobs and develops the knowledge and intelligence of our country. Our preference for open source is not motivated only by economic aspects. But there is also the possibility to develop new products, distribute the knowledge, access to new technologies and to stimulate the development of software in collaborative environments". This article shows how the Brazilian Government is using OSS, gives some examples of successful Brazilian projects that use OSS, explains some difficulties for implementing OSS, and makes a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of using OSS.

Using JavaScript Toolkits to Create Rich Internet Applications - Owen Byrne (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Since 2004, the number of Rich Internet Applications has increased, making them a key component of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Many RIAs have been developed using JavaScript and AJAX. AJAX is used to access remote data sources, that reside on the server or are available through an open API, directly from within the application. The rich variety of applications would not be available today without the concurrent appearance of many, powerful JavaScript toolkits that have taken the development of these applications from labour-intensive to nearly painless. These toolkits provide an open source alternative to the proprietary products developed by Adobe (Flash/Flex/Air) and Microsoft (Silverlight). This article provides two examples that demonstrate the evolution of RIAs, then compares the features of the most commonly used JavaScript Toolkits used to create RIAs. We then discuss how freely available toolkits are able to compete against proprietary alternatives. Finally, we provide some concluding remarks based on our experience with creating enterprise RIAs.

Value Co-Creation and New Marketing - Aron Darmody (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Co-creation grants consumers free rein to work with company-provided resources in the production of their own value offerings. The ongoing participation of active consumers in the production of their own use and exchange value inverts the long-standing marketing orthodoxy of the company as the arbiter of value. Rather than resist this fundamental shift in the locus of value creation, savvy firms positively embrace the change and seek to manage consumer freedoms in order to harness the consumers' productive capabilities. Using the example of the Apple iPhone and App Store, and drawing on labour theories of value and Foucault's notion of government, we show how granting consumers freedom through co-creation has become the most effective mode of production for contemporary marketers.

Value Co-creation as Part of an Integrative Vision of Innovation Management - Stoyan Tanev; Mette Knudsen; Wolfgang Gerstlberger (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
Value co-creation is an emerging concept in business, marketing and innovation management. Its growing interest points to the emergence of a new semantic wave in innovation research that requires the adoption of new terminology, frameworks and fields of research exploration. There is a number of existing research streams that provide a solid starting point in the discussion of different perspectives on co-creation. One key research aspect that needs to be further addressed is the potential benefits from the adoption of value co-creation practices and strategies. This article shares insights from an attempt to position the value co-creation paradigm within an integrative vision for innovation management research and practices. This positioning is a challenging task as the meaning of the terms "value co-creation" and "integrative" innovation management need to be more fully clarified. We attempt to identify an appropriate plane of conceptual integrity that could be used to describe the innovation management field within the context of its relation to value co-creation.

Value Co-creation: Lessons from Lead to Win Ecosystem - Tony Bailetti; David Hudson (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
While the concepts of value co-creation and business ecosystems have become dominant, there is lack of conceptual clarity as to the role of co-creation in a business ecosystem. The objective of this article is to provide concrete examples of co-creation in vendor neutral ecosystems using lessons learned from operating the Lead to Win ecosystem. In a vendor neutral ecosystem, no vendor dominates and membership is open to all individuals and organizations that meet specific criteria. The article is organized into three sections. The first section provides a short description of the Lead to Win ecosystem. The second section uses concrete examples to illustrate the lessons learned about co-creation in vendor neutral ecosystems. The third section describes key takeaways based on our five months experience operating the keystone of the Lead to Win ecosystem.

Viable Business Models for Corporate Co-creation Communities - Kim op den Kamp (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
The participation of people in online communities is rapidly increasing and the shared data, information and knowledge in these communities is becoming greater and more diverse. The social community Facebook.com has over 300 million active members and over 40 billion photos uploaded to the site each month. Wikipedia.org has more than 75,000 active contributors, who are working on 10 million articles in more than 260 languages. The opportunities of these large sources of information gathered in communities are being discovered by companies. Harley Davidson has established a large community where motorbikes and accessories are presented and discussed by members. Moreover, members interact about user- and maintenance tips. Participation in this community has been found to increase the commitment and affection for the Harley Davidson brand. The toy manufacturer LEGO has over 2.5 million participants in their community, 40% are adults, and 3,000 new designs are uploaded to this community weekly. The best designs are produced and sold in stores. The use of co-creation communities seems promising. However, the main business model elements that strengthen successful co-creation communities have not been defined yet. The elements of these communities that create value, that require resources, and that incur costs have not been explored in detail. The objective of this article is to provide insights into three main business model elements of co-creation communities: the value proposition, the value network, and the revenue model. These elements will be specified for distinctive new product development phases. The insights are obtained from our in-depth study of seven co-creation communities. We will conclude with some recommendations for creating successful co-creation communities.

Ways of Engaging Consumers in Co-production - Michael Etgar (Open Source Business Resource, 2009)
As co-production becomes an important engagement for many consumers-suppliers situations, the issue of how to encourage consumers to engage in co-production becomes an important question. Marketers need to recognize that co-production is not an automatic consumer situation but a conscious decision by consumers to engage in such activities. This article presents several factors which may enhance the ability of consumers to engage in co-production. To engage consumers, marketers have to ensure that they offer those products and services that can be individually adjusted and modified, and to present them to consumers who have a higher propensity to engage in co-production activities. In order for consumers to agree to such endeavours, marketers must find what kind of benefits targeted consumers seek in such activities. Those usually encompass economic, psychological and social needs. Then, they have to offer them packages which can fulfill such needs.

Adaptive Co-management and the Learning that Leads to Social Innovation - Nancy Doubleday (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Learning and social innovation are linked. Adaptive co-management offers strategies that empower learners to take responsibility, collaborate and create. To improve our understanding of how social innovation is nurtured, we examine three projects that used the adaptive co-management approach to support learners working in autonomous groups to create social goods and fill perceived gaps. The student projects led to the following social innovations: i) an organic food market serving students; ii) an open source approach to design in a field where proprietary approaches are more common; and iii) a model that extends the impact of what first year university students learn well beyond the classroom.

Blood on the Tracks: 6 Years of Technical Entrepreneurship in Ottawa - John Callahan; Tony Bailetti (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
In 2002, twenty nine engineers and computer scientists completed a Lead-to-Win (LTW) program in Technical Entrepreneurship. The LTW program was a pilot program designed for former Nortel employees to gain the skills needed to become entrepreneurs. Of the participants, fifteen started technology businesses, ten tried to attract venture capital funding, eleven tried to grow their companies with no venture capital funding, and seven established five technology businesses headquartered in Ottawa. These businesses attracted over $91 million from venture capital firms during one of the worst economic times to hit this region and created over 280 jobs globally. On May 15th at the Partnership Conference Series, John Callahan and Tony Bailetti, directors of the LTW program, and three of the LTW graduates spoke about the lessons learned during and since the program.

The Canadian DMCA: A Betrayal - Michael Geist (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Having had a few more hours to think about Industry Minister Jim Prentice's Canadian DMCA, I am left with one dominant feeling--betrayal. I have already highlighted the key provisions and coverage (and note that it will take some time to fully assess the implications of this bill) but it is immediately apparent that the concerns of thousands of Canadians--now over 45,000 on the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group alone--have been realized. If enacted, the Canadian DMCA would strongly encourage the use of technological locks and lawsuits. While Prentice has given a handful of new rights to Canadian consumers, each is subject to many limitations and undermined by the digital locks provisions that may effectively render the new rights meaningless.

Child-Centric Laptop to Help Address Social Needs - John Roese (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The One Laptop Per Child Foundation, founded by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte and a team of educators, developers and technologists, was launched in 2005 to design, manufacture and distribute laptop computers that are affordable enough to provide every child in the world with access to new channels of learning. Known as the XO, the little green-and-white US$188 laptop has since gone on to introduce computer literacy and self-empowered learning to children in countries and environments previously considered inaccessible. It's also an example of social innovation, where companies like Nortel are leveraging novel approaches-including open source software development-to drive change that will benefit society.

Community Building: NetBSD in Hindsight - David Maxwell; Lubomir Sedlacik (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The NetBSD Project is one of the oldest modern open source software projects. It provides an operating system that runs on over 50 hardware architectures (also called ports), including the IBM PC, Motorola PowerPC, and Sun UltraSPARC machines. Founded in May of 1993, the project has supported the operating system's active development and managed contributions from thousands of individuals. Prior to the New York City BSD Users Group Conference held in October, 2008, NetBSD developers from across the globe held a face to face meeting for planning and problem solving. Four developers from Sweden, Canada, the US, and Slovakia took a few minutes to think about how the NetBSD community has evolved over the past fifteen years. This article summarizes those perspectives and provides insight into how an open source community maintains development momentum while managing contributions from a large number of volunteers with varying skill levels from across the globe.

Contrasting Proprietary and Free/Open Source Game Development - Alessandro Rossi; Marco Zamarian (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Free/Libre Open Source Software (F/LOSS) development practices are gaining momentum in the computer game industry. This traditionally proprietary industry is becoming more interested in the F/LOSS paradigm for developing complex software projects. Software practitioners, both managers and developers, need to understand the potential in order to benefit properly from incorporating F/LOSS practices into their proprietary production cycle. Comparisons between proprietary and F/LOSS software development processes are usually characterized in terms of the relationship between property rights, revenue distribution and power within a network of actors. By contrast, coordination and control practices, mediating artifacts and development tools, and the interactions between the different actors involved in the development are often neglected. Proprietary and F/LOSS development differ in terms of the knowledge exchanges between the relevant actors and the different strategies employed to overcome information asymmetries. Recognizing this difference is an essential step for evaluating how proprietary, closed-source software houses can benefit by integrating various F/LOSS practices into their development agenda.

Coverity Report - David Maxwell (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
On May 20, 2008, static analysis tool vendor Coverity released a report entitled "Open Source Report 2008". The report includes information gathered over the first two years of the Coverity Scan project which was developed as part of a contract from the US Department of Homeland Security. Coverity provides its analysis tools to open source projects in order to identify quality and security flaws in the codebases. Once identified, the developers of the open source projects are given the information in order to facilitate hardening of the software. The report includes information about the progress made by various projects using the Scan service. Additionally, the Scan databases constitute one of the largest and most diverse collections of source code to be built and analyzed while tracking changes to those code bases over a two-year period. This data provides a substantial set of samples for considering some questions about the nature of software. The report investigates relationships between codebase size, defect counts, defect density, function lengths, and code complexity metrics. This article highlights some of the results from the report.

Creating Disruptive Value For Not-For-Profit Organizations Using Open Source - Fred Dixon; Jill Woodley (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Much of the currently available off-the-shelf software offers too many features and does not meet the unique usability needs of non-technical or disabled users using old hardware. When leveraging open source components to rapidly build products for not-for-profit organizations, the speed of development doesn't reduce the need to make the product accessible by the users. This article shares the experiences of a unique community/university partnership to bring accessible technology to the non-profit community in the National Capital Region.

The CUE Factor: Community-University Engagement for Social Innovation - Edward Jackson (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada informs us that our universities produce one-third of the roughly $10 billion in research and development generated in Canada. Our post-secondary institutions house some of Canada's most talented inventors and analysts as well as some of the best laboratories and think-tanks. The full value of this innovation is achieved when a university is able to successfully engage with the local geographic community in which it is based, including specific communities of interest that reside in the locality. Such meaningful and continuous community-university engagement (CUE) at the local level is a crucial pre-condition before a university can successfully execute partnerships with open source communities, which by their nature are dispersed across the globe, to create social value. By effectively engaging both the local and open source communities, Canadian universities can play a pivotal role in social innovation that addresses challenges in our own country as well as overseas. Accordingly, universities across Canada should increase their CUE factors by deepening and broadening their teaching, research and volunteering activities with the external constituencies that have the greatest need for sustainable solutions to the challenges they face every day. If social innovations are to make a real difference, Canadian universities must step forward in a major way. This article sets out a dynamic model for CUE and provides examples of creative local initiatives.

Data Access in Canada: CivicAccess.ca - Tracey P. Lauriault; Hugh McGuire (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
There is a global movement to liberate government-"owned" data sets, such as census data, environmental data, and data generated by government-funded research projects. This open data movement aims to make these datasets available, at no cost, to citizens, citizen groups, non-governmental-organizations (NGOs) and businesses. The arguments are many: such data spurs economic activity, helps citizens make better decisions, and helps us understand better who we are and where we are going as a country. Further, these data were collected using tax dollars, yet the government holds a monopoly which makes data available only to those able to pay the high access fees, while some data is not made available at all. The open data movement is lagging in Canada as demonstrated by exorbitant fees for such basics as the data set of postal codes correlated to electoral districts. This data could be used for any number of civic engagement projects, but it costs thousands of dollars due to Statistics Canada's policies of cost recovery. This article aims to bring these issues to a wider public. The long-term vision is a country in which citizens, specialists, professionals, academics, community groups and even businesses can work together, developing innovative information access and visualization tools, better decision-making models, and more tools responsive to the needs of the citizens. Liberating data will spur grassroots research on important social, economic, political and technical areas, currently hampered by lack of access to and high cost of civic data. Further, we want to link the debate about data to questions of government transparency and accountability, which pivot on access to accurate, reliable, and timely data.

Developing an Open Source Reference Implementation of the Canadian Electronic Health Records Solution - Mark Yendt; Duane Bender; Brian Minaji (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Developing a reference implementation of the Canada Health Infoway pan-Canadian Electronic Health Record Solution standard can be a useful step in ensuring the successful and cost-effective development of full scale electronic health systems in the Provincial Ministries of Health across Canada. These jurisdictions could benefit from the knowledge gained and the artifacts created in this prototype environment. The reference implementation utilizes an Enterprise Service Bus architecture and a Service Oriented Architecture design approach to build a Health Information Access Layer, as recommended by Canada Health Infoway. The system components and supporting technology developed will be released as open source. This set of technology could represent a starting point for prototyping an implementation in a production environment, for creating a standards development platform, for standards conformance testing, and/or as a test bed for evaluating alternative software components in a HIAL environment. Mohawk Applied Research Centre for Health Informatics at Mohawk College in Hamilton, Ontario, along with public and private sector partners, is continuing to build a reference implementation of the pan-Canadian Infoway standard that demonstrates the ESB/SOA approach. This article summarizes the project to date and suggested future research areas that will reduce the cost, risk and time barriers to widespread adoption of eHealth systems in Canada.

Driving Innovation Through Interoperability - John Weigelt (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Today's difficult economic environment provides a time of change where information technology matters more than ever. As business and service delivery leaders look to become even more effective and efficient in meeting their client's expectations, they are increasingly looking to electronic channels as an integral element of their business strategies. Regrettably, the ever increasing pace of technological change often disconnects the technology from the business requirements. This disconnection hides technology innovations from the business and has a broader impact of preventing business innovation. This article discusses the role service oriented architecture and interoperability can play in keeping an organization innovative and competitive. We also discuss Microsoft's interoperability principles, its commitment to its open source community, and the benefits of embracing openness as part of an organization's business strategy.

Editorial: Accessibility (July 2008) - Dru Lavigne (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)
Much has changed since the term "open source" was coined ten years ago. The idea of sharing code, once relegated to research institutions and hobbyists, is starting to reach ubiquity in the consciousness of both government and business. More recently, this concept has extended beyond software. Everything from hardware to data to knowledge is becoming "open". Despite this trend towards openness--or perhaps due to the stark contrast openness provides--accessibility remains a difficult obstacle to overcome. The issues surrounding accessibility take many forms. In the first article, Pierre-Paul Lemyre from the University of Montreal reminds us that everything old is new again. While the difficulties surrounding the open source licensing of software are still being resolved, those same difficulties are now being experienced when providing open access to data and knowledge. He proposes a global licensing repository as a solution towards providing access while complying with licensing terms. Marco Zehe from the Gnome Accessibility Project concentrates on ensuring that the features found in software applications are accessible to all, including those with disabilities.

Editorial: Building Community (October 2008) - Dru Lavigne; Michael Weiss (Open Source Business Resource, 2008)