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BT open source partnership
Thursday July 24th 2008. Posted: 14:23
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BT will dedicate free consultancy time and assistance to FOSSBazaar
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BT has announced a strategic partnership with a community and work group committed to developing and sharing best practice and tools to support the effective governance of free and open source software (FOSS) by businesses.
BT said it is joining FOSSBazaar as a strategic partner and will dedicate free consultancy time and assistance to the forum, in addition to contributing to white papers. BT will also work on the development of open source tools to support governance of FOSS in business. BT said it is committed to using FOSS throughout its organisation and is engaged in numerous FOSS projects, events and initiatives. It said the use of open source software and participation in the open source community will play a significant role in BT's transformation from a traditional telco to a software-driven communications services company. BT is one of a number of companies using FOSS that have come together to devote time to solving shared problems in order to advance the use of FOSS in the industry. The members of FOSSBazaar are committed to helping accelerate the use of FOSS in business and part of their activity focuses on providing general advice, guidance and tools in support of this. BT has its own open source operations team (OSOT), which supports the effective adoption of open source software and principles in BT. Among its responsibilities, OSOT provides clear guidelines and support for making use of and contributing open source code on behalf of BT. Free and open source is a term used to describe software where the underlying code can be read and modified by a developer as they see fit because the people who originally wrote the code are content for other people to amend and improve it to suit their needs. "Free" in this context can mean either zero cost or complete freedom to develop, or both. Often this software is developed in collaboration with a global open source community. Jeremy Ruston, head of open source innovation within BT Design, said: "Open source is vital to BT's transformation and the wider software community at large. We hope that our active community of software developers at BT continues to develop FOSS.” Further information about BT's open source initiatives can be found online.
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Last updated:
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