Brett Sheffield . com

Once again, the Scottish Open Source Awards were held as part of the Scottish Software Awards dinner at the Radission SAS in Glasgow. Thanks to Sales Agility for organizing the Awards again for the second year.

My company, Gladserv was shortlisted for the Open Source Business Excellence Award, which went to Wolfson Microelectronics. Fair enough - amongst other things they have a full time Linux kernel developer on staff!

What I found interesting was that none of the shortlisted entries for the Open Source Business Excellence Award were software companies. Two are IC companies: National Semiconductor and Wolfson. And then there’s Gladserv, a Hosted Services and Infrastructure company. We all use and develop software in our business, but software is not our business.

This got me thinking. Gladserv doesn’t publish a lot of code, which isn’t itself a problem. However, we publish a lot less code than we write. Our arrangements with our clients mean that everything we write is available under the GPL, but that’s not a lot of good if it never makes it onto an ftp server. We need to do better, and in 2009 I plan to make sure we do. Along with testing and documentation, publishing needs to become a standard part of our development process.