Phil Whitehouse of BT has written an article with twelve guidelines to build an open source community: "Some might say that open source communities "just happen", and that they operate on intuition and unwritten social rules, but this logic overlooks the vast quantity of open source projects that fail."

Enterprises and other users deploy open-source software because it works. For those of us in the open-source vendor community, however, too often we waste time talking about issues that have relatively little resonance for the vast majority of users.

It's not just European government that's opting for open source. Today the NSA (the super-secret spy agency in the US) have announced they are joining in with OpenSolaris. Barton has an interview that explores this more. I think we'll see more and more government engagement as the adoption-led market takes hold.

Using Free software from open source communities makes perfect sense for governments, and not just for the obvious reasons of up-front savings on license fees.

Your company's IT department probably depends on at least one open source application. The software does the job, is budget-friendly, and it has an active open source community which is constantly upgrading the application. But few applications are perfect, whether proprietary or open source.

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this, but there’s been a curious conflation of the ideas of the open standard OpenDocument format (ODF) and the concept of open source. Now there has long been confusion between open standards and open source, and that’s why I wrote the four part series last year that teased apart the two.

If 2008 had a buzzword, it was probably community. More and more companies are looking to tap into communities for contributions to open source projects. But following the open-source trend just because everyone is doing it isn't good enough.

Maybe it’s a coincidence but this week has seen evidence of tension between commercial open source vendors and elements of the open source user community. Matt Asay stirred up something of a hornet’s nest with his post questioning how open source vendors can find ways of encouraging users to contribute either code of cash in return for free software

Even if all open source communities aren't created equal, there are several characteristics that stand out amongst those which flourish. Qualities and tendencies which are often taken as a given within the context of open source but can and do go missing within other types of communities.

An IT research company made the prediction that by the year 2012, more than 3/4 of all software will be open source. Due to the ease with which open source software is developed and the rise in programmers and Internet communities, proprietary software will quickly dissipate.