OStatic

We've written on numerous occasions about open source adoption in government and education. The ways that open source solutions make sense in (and even philosophically complement) these areas are many, and often make any obstacles involved seem less critical. But for reasons that are frequently unrelated to the utility or appropriateness of open source software, adoption in the public sector has been slow.

It is on the increase, however. The Daily Gazette in Schenectady, New York, recently ran a piece detailing the reasons why the public sector has been hesitant about -- but not entirely resistant to -- adopting open source software.

One of the benefits of having a community of readers and open source users here at OStatic is that you can get good answers to questions about open source. On the toolbar atop our home page, you can click on Question, type yours in, and you'll usually get very informed responses back. There are also a lot of sites around the web where you can get excellent crowdsourced answers to all kinds of tech questions. In this post on WebWorkerDaily, you'll find five good resources for free answers, including the free forums at W3Schools, and Weegy. Check it out.?

When it comes to open source telephony software, Asterisk has one of the longest, most illustrious backgrounds in the market. There's been a nagging issue that's been holding Asterisk back, however, especially in larger enterprises -- a lack of professional support. Digium, the corporate entity that sponsors Asterisk, began offering tiered subscription support services through its storefront this week.

Just as it has been for the previous ten years, the Asterisk telephony engine and toolkit is available for download (free of charge, licensed under the GPL) with support, advice, and discussion offered through the community forums. The subscription support plans are designed to complement the community-driven efforts while giving enterprises the option to call upon dedicated experts to help with deployment, maintenance and training.

Is the availability and usefulness of open source support lagging behind its desirability? That's one of the messages that it's possible to get from a new survey conducted by OpenLogic, a company that specializes in selling enterprise-level open source software support. (We've looked at some other information from their open source experts in the past.)

One of the biggest problems in delivering open source software solutions comes after you've made an application available. How do you support it? Support is a huge cost center for commercial software companies that provide it, and is often prohibitive for open source developers. That leaves end users figuring out how to support themselves.

Could automated software support solutions help? The jury's still out, but I was interested in today's announcement from SourceLabs regarding new Linux and Java self-support tools. They're aimed at getting people who use open source software tools to share information within a software environment so that known problems can be identified and solved.