As we come up on the one year anniversary of the Open Logic Expert Community (OXC), I've been thinking about what's going well and what we can improve on.  The program itself is going really well.  What's not going well is the misconception some people have that we are only giving away trinkets!

We've signed up committers and contributors for many, many open source software projects – we currently have over 250 open source packages in our library!  These committers, OXC members, have proven that they can not only solve our enterprise customers' needs but they can do it in a very timely and professional manner.  As a strong advocate of the open source community, I'm proud to say that they've lived up to all my expectations and gone beyond.  Around the globe, around the clock.  We often have difficulty figuring out who to credit for an issue because several people will jump on it at once!  

As for the misconceptions … people seem to think we aren't paying cold, hard cash for this work.  Well, we are.  (At least I suppose PayPal, wire transfers and checks count as cold, hard cash in today's economy!)  When we started this program we talked to a lot of open source community members and got their feedback.  90% of them said they'd rather have things like XBoxes than cash.  The other 10% said they'd rather give their money to open source organizations like Apache.  So we said, ok we'll give you an incentive like an XBox to sign up and then for each issue you solve you'll get points that you can trade in for cash (1:1), merchandise or you can donate it.  So far everyone except for one person has opted for the cash.  Another notable point is that the community members thought $20/issue would be fair … we thought about it and decided $100/issue would be a better starting point.  

The only other "issue" we've had is that we haven't had a bug to fix in every project.  It's disappointing to line up people to support projects and then find out they've done such a good job on their project that it doesn't have any bugs.  What a problem to have!

So, as we come up on the one year anniversary of the OpenLogic Expert Community, I'm happy to report the program is successful in achieving our goal of uniting enterprises with the open source community in a way that enables enterprises to use open source software and supports the open source community at the same time. 

Thank you to all of our Expert Community members and to the rest of the open source community for all their hard work developing and supporting some awesome software!