Open Source

ThoughtWorks is an active member and supporter of the Open Source Software (OSS) community. We've seen firsthand how Open Source tools -- when coupled with proven Agile development best practices -- can enable clients to improve the effectiveness of their IT organisations.

In today's budget-constrained environment, OSS is receiving more attention than ever. The success of projects like CruiseControl, CruiseControl.NET and others have resulted in measurable commercial value for countless Global 1000 companies. This success is prompting senior IT leaders to move beyond OSS development tools, and consider how their companies can stretch their IT dollars by using other OSS in development, test and production environments.

ThoughtWorks recognizes that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to using OSS for large IT organisations. Staff skills, economic considerations, system reliability, procurement process, legal requirements and operations support all need to be carefully evaluated before going down the OSS path.

ThoughtWorks helps IT organisations:

• Assess the economic benefits of OSS
• Define attributes for candidate business applications
• Assess various organisational impacts, including procurement processes, staff skills and training, operations support and intellectual property issues
• Create a roadmap to move from an environment of commercial software to some level of OSS
• Determine if and where OSS is appropriate throughout the development life cycle. There are classes of applications that will require full-featured commercial products, but OSS could be an option during the development and test stages of the lifecycle
• Evaluate various commercial and OSS software options at every level of the stack, including OS, databases, application servers, Web services, middleware, and development tools.

Learn more about the various OSS projects ThoughtWorkers contribute to at ThoughtWorks Opensource.

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