Open Source: Some Positive News

In case you haven’t noticed, open source has exploded into the mainstream and the profitable band-wagon that has built up revolves around “setup & support”, “customisation” and “enhanced enterprise editions”.

Yes, a lot of those companies do not solely handle FOSS projects, but it is a valuable part of their business.

The best part of FOSS is that because it is free and readily available, the potential people who will be exposed to the product is greatly increased. With MV-style databases largely unknown (and not understood), having more people aware of the technology can only improve the scene for us that work with it. The more companies using it means more jobs. Who can argue that against that?

That’s why Brian Leach’s announcement at the end of July is such a positive step for the community at large.

mvScan was originally a tool that I had developed for my use, to document a UniVerse system by iterating through the account and file structures, building impact maps and filling out tables with information culled from the entries found to make it easier for someone to search through their system.

…

So I’ve decided the best way forward is for me to open it up. That way, people who want to run it on their systems can do so and feed back any updates and changes that result from applying it to their specific structure and code organization.

So watch this space for announcements. If this goes well, there’s plenty of other stuff I want to open source.

You can read more on mvScan at Brian’s site.

I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to the release.