Companies strapped for development time and resources have found a combination of traditional and open-source development models can save money and reduce vendor lock-in.The concept of community-source
development is catching on with enterprise organizations, both inside and outside
of corporate and organizational walls for its ability to cut costs, increase
collaboration and avoid vendor lock-in.
Community source is a
hybrid development model that blends elements of directed development—in the
classic sense of an organization employing staff and resources to work on a
project—and the openness of traditional open source such as Apache, according to Brad Wheeler, vice president for information
technology, CIO and professor of information systems at the
Indiana University Kelley School of Business.
The Gartner market
research firm claims some responsibility for coining the term "community
source." In one of the company's reports, Gartner analyst Brian Prentice
said community source occurs "when users decide to band together to create
their own open-source solutions without the participation of any external
vendor. It’s an emerging phenomenon, particularly in the public sector."
Brian Behlendorf, a
founding member of the Apache Software Foundation and prominent open-source
software community leader, said, "Community
source is where you identify a common need across a group of entities, and you put those entities together as peers to
drive development, and they all go off and use the product. It's about forging
an open-source development community out of a latent set of interests."
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