Open Source getting more financial support from the corporate world

By walekJ

By now I’m sure you’ve seen more than enough articles about the so-called “Heartbleed” vulnerability in the OpenSSL project, so I don’t want to write yet another Heartbleed article. But I would like to point you to one that talks about the need for companies who use open source software to support it financially… something Polarion Software has been doing since our start-up days.

In a recent ZD Net article “Cisco, Microsoft, VMware, and other tech giants unite behind critical open-source projects”, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols discusses how the Linux Foundation has “brought together both open-source supporters and companies better known for proprietary software to fund mission-critical open-source projects”. Companies like Cisco, Microsoft and VMWare are now part of a group that works together to identify mission-critical open source software projects that need financial support, and ensure they get the funding they need for ongoing development. According to the article, OpenSSL will top the list of such projects. You can read the full article if you would like more details.

Polarion’s Open Source Support

I thought this might be a good time to point out that Polarion Software has a long history of actively supporting open source software. A big reason for that is because we architected our products to leverage open source whenever possible. Our thinking has always been, why “reinvent the wheel” and build proprietary components if there’s a robust, well supported open source solution for it? So we didn’t build a web server for our web-based solutions – we used Apache HTTP Server. We didn’t “roll our own” versioning system because Subversion^® already provided everything we needed and more. We didn’t attempt a proprietary framework because Eclipse delivered what we needed. This approach has enabled us to focus on developing innovative high-value features and technologies like Polarion^® LiveDoc™ documents, embedded industry and standards knowledge and support, as well as a top-notch user experience.

If you’re not a software developer, you may not have heard about an open source project called Subversive SVN Team Provider. It’s a plug-in to the Eclipse development platform that provides connectivity with Subversion. It is part of the Eclipse standard distributions, and one of the most downloaded plugins for Eclipse. Polarion Software is an Eclipse Foundation member, and has underwritten Subversive development from the beginning.

If you’re already well versed in Subversion, you might not know about Subtrain. It’s the first-ever open source training curriculum for Subversion (or any other technical subject, as far as we know!) It’s developed and maintained by Polarion Software, and it’s freely available to use and adapt to your training needs.