Welcome to the openeo.biz project

The goal of this initiative is to establish a community interested in researching the organizational structures of open source projects and the business models of companies that are related to them. In other words we are exploring the open source ecosystems to find out which aspects and relations between business and the community-driven development are responsible for their successes and their downfalls.

Enter the Knowledge base summary for a brief overview of the sites topics

By doing this research we want to create a knowledge base that will be a good starting point for every one who is considering to create a new open source project or to open an already established closed source one. We want to give those people detail examples of how these type of projects got organized in the IT business and how companies and individuals that founded them set up their business models to monetize their work.

To be more precise we want to:

  • Give CEO's  and product managers - a brief introduction of how open source works followed by detailed real world examples; make them aware of the impacts of open sourcing their products on their companies strategy and business models
  • Give programmers, managers and team leads - examples of how open source projects get organized, how those organizational structures are influenced by the companies business models and help in building a community around the projects
  • Give the sales and marketing staff - a view on how to generate profits in an environment where per-copy license fees are not an option, how open source influences their companies PR and software distribution

For now this is mostly a one man project done by me, Adam Walczak which also serves me as a tool to organize information I gather for my master's thesis. But I hope that you and other people with the same interest will join to participate in it so that we can call it a truly community effort and I can remove this paragraph :) I also want to mark that I plan to be active in this initiative after the thesis is written so be sure that this is NOT just a write, pass and forget student project.

Please feel free to use the knowledge base assembled so far. Take part in the initiative any time by adding and editing articles, filling surveys or taking part in our forum discussions.

Current activities

Site summary

  • News - news from the open source world and our sites activity
  • Knowledge base - a wiki where we coordinate research and assemble our knowledge
  • Forum - main place for discussions about the topics related to our research