Is one of your resolutions for the new year to create an enterprise open source governance process for your organization, or review and update your existing governance process? If your organization doesn’t already have an open source governance process, this should definitely be on your list of goals for 2012. Ditto if you have a governance process that’s outdated, incomplete, or inconsistently implemented throughout the organization.

As with any business process change, it can be difficult to find the time, inspiration, and support from others necessary to get started with creating or updating your company’s open source governance process. If you find yourself in this predicament, now is the perfect time to review the many ways an effective governance process can positively impact your organization. Here’s a list of five benefits to help motivate you and your team to get started.

1. Improved Employee Morale

Inconsistent, outdated, or (even worse) non-existent rules and processes are frustrating. If employees don’t know how, when, and where open source is allowed or even encouraged, there’s a good chance that someone will eventually make a mistake that gets him or her – and potentially the organization as a whole – into trouble. Conversely, when employees are aware of the boundaries of acceptable open source usage, know how to procure open source, and have defined processes for requesting approval for new packages, they don’t need to worry about causing problems by using the wrong open source license or package.

An effective open source governance process improves employee morale by enabling smart, appropriate open source usage while enforcing rules fairly and consistently. An effective governance process also enables employees to request approval for new open source packages or new uses of open source, thereby eliminating any inclination to go around the company’s open source policy.

2. Increased Open Source Usage

By defining boundaries and processes, you can actually increase open source usage in the organization. This in turn can bring forth other benefits such as lowering technology costs, accelerating innovation, and attracting and keeping top technical talent. After all, who doesn’t want to be part of an organization that uses the latest open source technologies and out-innovates its competition?

3. Improved Public Relations

Good intentions can go a long way, especially when it comes to public relations. An effective open source governance process can help your organization develop and maintain a positive relationship with the open source community. This might include project contributors and committers, advocacy groups such as the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and Free Software Foundation (FSF), and even individual developers who may be potential customers or employees.

How exactly will your governance process create this goodwill? You’ll first have to communicate the fact that your company has an open source policy, encourages open source usage, and has processes in place to govern open source usage. This can be done with a page on your corporate website, a dedicated open source subdomain or site (for open source fulfillment, for example), and/or by encouraging employees to participate in and present at open source conferences. No matter how you do it, the bottom line is you’re likely to see positive results when the open source community knows you’re trying to do the right thing in terms of responsible open source usage and license compliance.

4. Improved Budget and Resource Planning

An effective open source governance process will help your organization better understand what open source software is in used as well as the nature if its usage. This can be an eye-opening experience for companies that didn’t previously track and govern open source usage. Organizations often learn that they’re using a lot more open source than they thought they were, and that many open source projects are deployed in production systems and critical customer-facing websites or applications.

Whether your governance process simply confirms what you thought you knew or opens your eyes to an entirely different picture, gaining accurate data will help you better plan budgets and allocate resources. You may find that that you need open source support for critical systems, or that you have redundant services contracts with different vendors that can be combined or eliminated. You may also realize that you need to put a greater focus on open source license compliance for packages used in distributed products, or that there are opportunities to replace commercial software with open source already used elsewhere in the organization. Regardless of the conclusions you draw, you’re likely to be better prepared for future planning with the data your open source governance process gives you.

5. Reduced Legal Risks and Less Chance of IP Infringement

The most obvious benefit of an effective open source governance process is perhaps also the most significant. By definition, an open source governance process will help your organization understand and control how, where, and when open source software and licenses are used – essentially operationalizing your open source policy. Assuming your policy is comprehensive and up-to-date (if not, check out my last entry, 3 Steps to Jumpstart Your Open Source Policy), a governance process that enforces it should help your organization prevent open source license violations, reduce potential legal risks, and avoid IP infringement.

What do you think is the greatest impact of an open source governance process? If you select other, please leave a comment and share your thoughts!

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Developing and maintaining an open source policy is the foundation of an effective enterprise open source governance process. An open source policy that is current, comprehensive, adaptable, and continually reviewed will help guide your organization to increased open source usage where appropriate while reducing potential open source license violations.

When was the last time you reviewed and updated your company’s open source policy? If it’s been a year or more – or even worse, if you don’t yet have a formal, written open source policy – make a resolution to start the new year with a renewed focus on creating or updating your policy and aligning your open source governance processes with it.

Fortunately, there are a ton of great articles, examples, and suggestions available to help guide your efforts. Here’s a list of three easy steps to jumpstart your open source policy, plus a bunch of free policy and governance resources to help you get stated on the right track.

1. Bone Up On Open Source Policy Best Practices

You may not have experience writing an open source policy. Heck, you may not even be a lawyer (and for the record, I’m not either). That’s fine. No matter your level of experience and expertise, following best practices is as good a place to start as any.

One of the first open source policy resources I always recommend is Stormy Peters’ excellent article, Best Practices for Creating an Open Source Policy. Although several years old now, this article remains an essential primer for anyone engaged in open source policy creation or review. Stormy outlines everything from why you need a policy to critical components to the key questions you should consider as you create or update your company’s policy.

A fantastic companion to Stormy’s piece is Ragavan Srinivasan’s article, From Policy to Process: Best Practices for Creating an Open Source Governance Process. While the scope of Ragavan’s article goes well beyond open source policies, he does an excellent job of explaining the importance of policies as part of the overall enterprise open source governance process.

2. Evaluate Your Current Open Source Policy

Odds are you have some form of open source policy, even if it’s informal, poorly documented, or specific to a particular department or group within your organization. Start with whatever you have and conduct a thorough review with the key stakeholders in your organization – typically representatives from legal, engineering, procurement, and management – to establish the current state of your policy, identify areas that need improvement, and agree upon next steps.

As you get started on this phase of the process check out our on-demand webinar, Boost Your Open Source Policy: How to Evaluate and Improve Your Company’s Policy. In this session our CEO Steven Grandchamp leads a panel discussion with open source veterans from several Fortune 100 organizations who share their first-hand experience creating, maintaining, and implementing open source policies. This resource will help you understand not only how to get started with the evaluation process, but also how align your policy with changing needs and goals and communicate and implement the final policy document.

Another on-demand webinar worth your time during this phase is Developing an Open Source Governance and Compliance Program at Bank of America, in which Don D’Angelo, Senior Vice President of Open Source Product Management at Bank of America, shares invaluable tips from his experiences creating an open source policy and governance processes. This one will help you understand what an industry-leading open source policy looks like and how your evaluation process can set the groundwork for future policy greatness.

3. That Policy Ain’t Gonna Write Itself

Sooner or later you’re going to have to put pen to paper and translate all those best practices, examples, and tips to practical policy statements that are specific to your organization’s open source usage model. When you’re ready to start working on your open source policy, check out our free (and recently updated and expanded) Open Source Policy Builder, which walks you through all the questions your formal policy should answer, including:

• Which open source licenses are approved for use in your company’s products?
• Is open source distributed in your company’s products?
• Who’s responsible for understanding license terms and conditions and ensuring compliance with them?
• What kind of security or integrity review is required during procurement?
• Are employees allowed to contribute to open source projects?
• Are employees allowed to speak publicly about the company’s open source usage?

Finally, if at all possible check out examples of other organizations’ open source policies – particularly companies in your industry and/or with similar usage models. Many governmental organizations publish their policies (for example, check out the policies posted on Civic Commons), which may be at least interesting to read if not directly applicable. Additional examples might be found through colleagues at other companies, professional organizations or industry meetings, posting questions on LinkedIn groups, and conducting web searches. In short, take advantage of the community nature of open source and ask others for help – people are likely to share any information and resources they can to help you successfully and safely use open source software.

Have other open source policy resources to suggest? Please leave a comment!

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Open source is an integral part of almost every embedded consumer product, but companies using open source to build embedded products face significant challenges as they work to comply with open source licenses without eroding already thin margins. It's critical for embedded vendors to build open source compliance activities into existing development and supply chain processes in order to avoid dealing with licensing issues at the last minute, or — even worse — after a product has shipped.

On Thursday, August 4 we're hosting a webinar about managing vendors and satisfying customers while ensuring open source compliance in the supply chain. John Ellis, a 20-year veteran of Motorola who helped form the company's industry-leading open source software program, will showcase a best-in-class open source governance program and introduce best practices for developing or refining your governance program. Topics to be covered include:

• Governance considerations for different categories of embedded consumer product software
• Actionable strategies for improving your existing open source governance policies
• Communicating governance policies to internal and external audiences
• How to incorporate training in your governance process

Reserve your seat for this informative session today!

If your company is using open source software — and odds are it is — it likely has at least an informal policy about how and where open source software can be used. But whether your company has informal guidelines or a detailed, enterprise-wide open source policy, it's important to conduct periodic reviews to ensure that your policy is aligns with internal goals and addresses ongoing changes in open source licenses and technologies.

On Thursday, July 14, we're hosting a free webinar about best practices for evaluating and improving enterprise open source policies. In this webinar Dave McLoughin, Open Source IP Analyst for OpenLogic, will discuss how to conduct policy reviews, identify areas for improvement, and roll out updates across the enterprise. Topics to be covered include:

• Key stakeholders to involve in the policy evaluation process
• Aligning your policy with changing needs and goals
• Adapting your policy to changing licenses and technologies
• Communicating and implementing policy changes
• Establishing an ongoing review process

Whether you have an informal open source policy, a formal policy, or no policy at all, be sure to join us on Thursday the 14th for Boost Your Open Source Policy: How to Evaluate and Improve Your Company's Policy.

The Future of Open Source Survey is back, and OpenLogic is proud to once again be a survey collaborator. Just like last year, the North Bridge team will present the survey results at the OSBC conference, but first we want to hear your thoughts open source!

The survey asks participants to share insight on the state of open source software including open source business models, the factors driving adoption of open source, and how the market will evolve over the coming years. In addition, this year's survey emphasizes the connections between open source and the cloud and open source and mobile. So if you haven't already done so, please take a few minutes to participate in the survey before the April 22nd deadline. For more information on The Future of Open Source survey, including the results from last year's survey, visit the Future of Open Source Forum.

Hadoop and HBase make it easy to store terabytes of data, but how do you scale your search mechanism to sift through these mountains of bits and retrieve large result sets in a matter of milliseconds?

On Tuesday, January 25 we're hosting a free webinar in which OpenLogic's Founder and CTO Rod Cope will discuss how the Solr search server, based on Lucene, provides a scalable querying capability that nicely complements HBase. In this webinar Rod will use OpenLogic's production Solr and Hadoop environment as a case study on how you can handle rapid fire queries against terabytes of data, primarily through a combination of index sharding and fault-tolerant load balancing. Additional topics to be covered in this webinar include:

• How to avoid pitfalls when initially loading your data
• Pros and cons of putting Big Data in a public cloud
• Tips on how to make your implementation go more smoothly.

If you want to learn how you can put scalable, high-performance search to work on your own Big Data, this is one webinar you won't want to miss. Reserve your seat today!

There's no shortage of reasons to use open source software for your mission-critical projects, but one of the benefits of open source that sometimes gets overlooked is the frequent release schedule – open source projects typically fix bugs and release new features much, much faster than commercial software companies. However, this "release early and often" approach can make it difficult to stay on top of the most recent open source security updates and version releases.

We help our customers keep current with this critical information through our OpenUpdate Notification newsletters, which provide alerts on security updates and new releases as soon as we learn about them. Subscribers to OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX) and our open source support services receive the OpenUpdate Notification Premium Edition at no extra cost. But whether or not you're a current customer, we want to help you stay on top of important releases and patches. That's why we're now offering OpenUpdate Notification Free Edition, which delivers biweekly emails summarizing the latest open source releases and security patches. To start receiving these free updates, simply follow the link below and enter your email address in the subscription box.

Register for OpenUpdate Notification Free Edition »

Hadoop, HBase, and friends are built from the ground up to support Big Data, but that doesn't make them easy. Just like with any other relatively new and complex technologies, there are some rough edges and growing pains to manage. We've learned some hard lessons while deploying HBase tables containing billions of rows and dozens of terabytes on OpenLogic's Hadoop infrastructure.

On Wednesday, December 8 we're hosting a free webinar in which OpenLogic's Founder and CTO Rod Cope will discuss some of the "gotchas" you might run into when deploying Hadoop and HBase in your own private cloud and how to avoid them. Topics to be covered in this webinar include:

• Hard-to-find configuration problems and debugging techniques
• Under-documented yet critical features
• Deployment recommendations for particular use cases
• Advice on how to import Big Data
• Using JRuby/Ruby to make life with Hadoop and HBase easier

To register for this informative session, go to our webinars and events page.

Want to learn how to install, configure, and administer JBoss? We're offering online JBoss training from Tuesday, November 9 through Friday, November 12. This course is instructor-led and includes a free e-book of the training materials. Class begins at 9:00 Pacific / Noon Eastern every day and lasts for four hours per day.

Purpose: Learn how to install, configure, and administer JBoss, the leading open source Java EE Container

Audience: Experienced Java Developers and Administrators wanting a production-quality command of JBoss AS

Summary: JBoss Administration training focuses on installing, configuring, and tuning JBoss AS as a Java EE container. The JBoss Administration training is structured around the most recent JBoss 5.X release.

As enterprise use of open source software approaches 100%, it's becoming more imperative than ever for businesses to determine what open source software is being used, establish open source policies, and ensure open source license compliance. Litigation, loss of revenue, and compromised bargaining position are some of the risks associated with lack of open source license compliance. As a result, open source audits are becoming common requirements in a wide variety of scenarios, including mergers and acquisitions, financing, and distribution deals.

On Wednesday, November 10 we're hosting a free webinar in which we'll discuss why open source audits are necessary and what they entail. Attendees will learn about available audit methods, the issues that can arise as a result of audits, and how to leverage the resulting audit report.

p>If you're planning or conducting an open source audit, or if you're involved with enterprise open source license compliance, be sure to join us for this informative session.