MIT open-sources mobile code
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has been talking for the past year about how a vast, largely unexplored repository of great software is the enterprise, and how much value could be unlocked by open-sourcing it.
Open source creates better software, Whitehurst argues, so why not expand its value by expanding its community?
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology apparently has heard the call, opting to open-source its Mobile Web project, as reported by ReadWriteWeb. The code "offers a staff and student directory, a campus map, the shuttle schedule, an event calendar, class announcements for students, emergency information, and status updates for many of MIT's tech services."
In other words, it offers much the same functionality that every university would likely want to provide its students and faculty. Because MIT has open-sourced the code, there's the potential for a community of universities to co-develop the project further, reducing MIT's support burden for its code and enriching the code base.
It's perhaps not surprising that MIT, which has won awards for its open-source innovations in the past, is the institution behind the open-source Mobile Web project. What is surprising is that so many universities and enterprises persist in reinventing the wheel, dumping resources into writing software that is common across their market segments that could more efficiently be created or maintained by a community.
Time to follow MIT's lead. Time to embrace open source and its efficiencies.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
