Mapping The Corporate Open Source World?

jukal asks: "I am building a contact database about open source activities and their contacts in large companies. It will be a kind of 'mindmap' positioning each of the big players, listing their key characteristics, their publically stated views on Open Source, and possible connections between the activities of the companies. Could you provide me with a helping hand to get started. Yes, I am doing this for the purposes of Openchallenge but I believe many others would benefit as well. I would like to map the open source world from the 'corporate viewing point' :) Post the details - or anything you got - here, or directly to me [/. profile] And as there will anyway be someone saying 'Go Google It Yourself' - If you think it's Google-able, give it a shot. If this has been already done, then that would be excellent!"

Privacy

[Trusty Penfold]

Do you think all these people will mind you putting their names and contact information into a huge database?

Re:Privacy

[jukal]

Do you think all these people will mind you putting their names and contact information into a huge database?

I am not going to put their names and contact details in a publicly acceptable database. Publishing that information would actually be against the finnish law. However, there are significant (non-personating, is this english :)) pieces of other information which can be published and which benefits many. Also, the contact details are not as important as the other information - currently I have no idea about how majority of the the top 500 companies see open source.

Here's one

[Anonymous Coward]

Name: Steve Ballmer

Position: CEO

Company:Microsoft

View on open source: cancer [suntimes.com]

not working

[bpb213]

Unfortionatly, slashdotters motivation and hunger for this "karma" substance doesnt seem to extend to doing any actual work.

Maybe if you tried the "dollar" substance, you might get better results.

Apple

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Don't forget the BSD guys at Apple. Hubbard springs immediately to mind, but I think there are others, as well.

How you would find them I dunno, really--hang out in newsgroups? Post ads?

Re:Apple

[VisorGuy]

How you would find them I dunno, really--hang out in newsgroups? Post ads?

You seem to have missed the fact that he posted what amounts to an ad on Slashdot.

Data needed?

[Alethes]

Assuming all of the information you're looking for is publically available, can you post a list of the fields needed for all the companies? Otherwise, nobody really knows where to start.

On second thought...

[Alethes]

It might be better to have some sort of website somewhere with a form for people to use to fill out that contact database for you, rather than trying to somehow harvest that data from /. posts. If people believe in this idea, they'll volunteer their time to help make this a very thorough database.

Re:On second thought...

[jukal]

It might be better to have some sort of website somewhere with a form for people to use to fill out that contact database for you, rather than trying to somehow harvest that data from /. posts. If people believe in this idea, they'll volunteer their time to help make this a very thorough database.

Good idea, I will whip up something quick now and post the url here.

Re:On second thought...

[jukal]

It might be better to have some sort of website somewhere with a form for people to use to fill out that contact database for you, rather than trying to somehow harvest that data from /. posts. If people believe in this idea, they'll volunteer their time to help make this a very thorough database.

Ok, I now punched in webpage with a form for entering the data, you can access it here [openchallenge.org].

Full time job

[itwerx]

How many bodies can you hire to keep it up to date? :)

IBM

[p0ppe]

Name: Michael O'Connell (moc(a)us.ibm.com)
Position: Editor-in-chief of DeveloperWorks
Company: IBM

"Our mission is to help you be a better software programmer, a more productive (and perhaps more rested, less stressed) coder.

We hope to help you unleash the full power of hardware and operating systems, bridge multiple platforms, and be more successful through the use of open standards and cross-platform technologies such as Java, Linux, XML, and open source projects. developerWorks offers articles, sample code, tutorials, tools, news, discussion forums, emerging technologies -- virtually anything developers like you want and need to get your job done.

The developerWorks team is passionate about open standards and technologies. We tap into relevant expertise and perspective from both inside and outside IBM. We are developers, researchers, journalists, and business people critically seeking and leveraging the technical breadth and depth from the 100,000-person-strong technical community of IBM. (Note: IBM invests about $6 billion/year on research and is dedicated to helping customers integrate business systems through the use of open, cross-platform standards). We combine this collection of IBM talent and resources with a hand-picked assembly of independent industry-leading developers." -http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/aboutdw/ [ibm.com]

Re:IBM

[p0ppe]

You want his phone number too? It's available at http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/aboutdw/staf f.html. I don't really feel like posting the poor guys # on /.

Open Source at Cubic Systems

[scotch]

The guys at Cubic Systems, Inc [timecube.com] have been active with work to increase the amount of time available in the kernel scheduler since the 1.0 days. These guys have done some great work, but are largely unsung heroes.

I don't have the POC name at Cubic Systems, but you can try this email address for a query: [e-mail]

Are you doing this...

[Locke!Erasmus]

at the request of Microsoft or John Ashcroft? Aw shucks, does it matter?

A bit of clarification

[jukal]

I think the article I posted was still maybe a bit unclear, I was maybe a bit too tired when posting it :) What I am aiming to do, is not to list publicly the contact details for the individuals in these companies. Doing so would be also against (atleast the finnish) law.

Instead, if we take the for example the 500 biggest companies in the world [fortune.com] - I would like to get a hunch on: what is their view on Open Source, what Open source related activities do they have going on (are they researching, do they have existing projects based on open source), what other companies are these activities linked to.

So what's in it for us?

[RhetoricalQuestion]

So what you're saying is, you want us to help you collect all this data and then not share it? I'm not saying you should share it, but if you're asking me to help you do something for your own personal interest, I'd like something out of it. ;-)

You may have some difficulty with the Fortune 500. As many of these companies are not tech industry companies, having a public stance on Open Source is irrelevant -- even if it's going on.

However, you could also check:

• Press releases (each company should have a pressroom section on their site)
• Search reports and article on finance site (yahoo! finance is a good place to start.)
• Go through tech conference/tradeshow presentations -- many companies present at these shows and slides and contact info are often available. Java on Wall Street may be good for finding the companies you seek.
• Cold call. Look up the CIO or CTO of each of these companies, call their main number and ask for them. Then ask the guy in charge. When successful, you will get better information that way -- though cold-calling is VERY hard to do successfully. Alternatively, for every contact you get, call them up (or email, though calling works better) politely explain what you're doing, ask them questions, and ask them if they know anyone else in the industry you should speak to.

Instead of the Fortune 500, though, I might focus on the Fortunre e50. These are the biggest tech companies, and are more likely to be aware of, have an influence on, and be working with Open Source. Companies in other industries may have huge tech departments, but their core business isn't tech -- so Open Source is not necessarily something they think about, so they're less likely to have a specific view on Open Source. Tech companies generally will.

Re:So what's in it for us?

[jukal]

firstly, sorry if this is messy. This PDA terminal does not quite refresh. All the data I get will be freely and completely available for everyone and anyone to use. What I meant was just that I do not wish to collect information that cannot be published at all. Btw, your idea of concetrating on e50 is good, and if we got those mapped it would be a great start.

A webpage for entering the data

[jukal]

It might be better to have some sort of website somewhere with a form for people to use to fill out that contact database for you, rather than trying to somehow harvest that data from /. posts. If people believe in this idea, they'll volunteer their time to help make this a very thorough database.

Ok, I now punched in webpage with a form for entering the data, you can access it here [openchallenge.org].