Kirrily Robert has written to let me know that she’s declared this week to be “Sysadmin Week” over at the Perl Survey. If you’re a sysadmin, help out the Perl community by letting them know how you use it, it only takes around 5 minutes.

Introduction

If things go as hoped documenting how a Fortune 1000 size enterprise implemented an Open Source strategy will provide guidance to others. The term, Open Source, started as a way to approve licenses for software whose code became published and available for others to modify for their needs. Almost tens years after the Open Source Initiative, we have discovered that the concept has far surpassed its original meaning and intent. Today, people realize that Open Source has eclipsed the vision of the OSI founders. The methodologies behind Open Source give organizations the power to reduce development time and produce a superior product. You can make comparisons to other paradigm shifts through history and the Open Source movement will come out favorably.

What topics can you expect?

1. Dissecting the methodology used to produce most Open Source software
2. The existing culture in traditional development shops
3. Finding champions to further acceptance
4. Education - getting through the alligator pit
5. Setting up an internal OSS development environment and selecting a pilot project
6. Disclosing the bundle if OSS tools and technologies
7. Finding resources to administer the development environment
8. Introducing existing OSS for immediate use: Firefox, Openoffice.org, GIMP and so forth
9. Delivering the pilot
10. Writing the findings report.

Here we go. You’ll look at drafts and ultimately a finished book. You can also help by working on our wiki.

I’m looking forward to this project.