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Today, we published the Optaros Free and Open Source Software Policy. This is something that I have wanted to do since we started the company and I’m pretty excited about it for several reasons.

• We wanted to have a policy that would be attractive to employees who want to engage with open source projects and communities. We believe that developers who participate in open source projects make better consultants.
• We needed to make it clear to our customers that we understand both the benefits of working with open source and the resposibilities that come with doing work for hire. In consulting, the client always comes first and nothing in this policy changes that.
• We wanted to make a commitment to the OSS community that we will be a good citizen. Being a good citizen is measured in deeds, not words, but this policy shows the guidelines we expect our employees to follow.

Creating the policy was the first thing, but we also wanted to publish the policy (and do so under a CC license) to encourage other companies to adopt similar guidelines. Currently, too much open source work in Enterprise IT is done as skunkworks and under-the-radar of management. This puts employees at risks and prevents companies from realizing the benefits they would get if they encouraged and supported their developers’ OSS activities. My hope is that developers and IT management can use this policy to drive similar conversations at other companies.

Dan Woods has written a great article (IT and Open Source: Uncovering the Essential Processes) that talks about how using open source software improves your IT department. He points out that when IT departments succesfully use open source, they are forced to think about several things that they should have been thinking about already. Dan’s examples include staff skills, hybrid/integratable architectures, governance, evaluation process, support plans, and your company’s relationship to intellectual property.



Responsibly and successfully adopting open source should include considerations in all of these areas.



I’m looking forward to the enterprise-focused OSBR program that Dan is running at OSCON this year.

As Java developers, we have plenty of great tools for coding and build time assistance. And several products exist to assist with monitoring applications in runtime. But a gap exists between coding and production where our only tools are log files and Google searches. And as more and more great open source libraries become available, stepping through unfamiliar code becomes a time-consuming and overwhelming way to develop.



To address that gap, I’ve been working on an open source tool, called WTFIGO.

WTFIGO is a collection of development runtime diagnostic tools which assist Java developers building Web applications, particularly using Open Source frameworks. WTFIGO installs in your web application and provides information through a number of web interfaces. There are 4 components to WTFIGO:

Application Dashboard

The application dashboard provides detailed
runtime information about the application and
its components. The application dashboard can
detect the presence of a number of open source
libraries and will provide information as
appropriate. Currently supported libraries
include Spring and Hibernate.

In-page Diagnostics

Diagnostic information can be added to every
page response which includes log messages
related to the request.

Advanced Exception Handling

Informative exception handling messages with
greater contextual information about exceptions
than simple stack traces

Debug widgets

A collection of JSP tags that can be used to
assist in development activities

A feature demo and the first semi-stable technology preview early release alpha version is available at wtfigo.org. Check it out and I’d be thrilled to hear your feedback.

Two great, new resources for finding open source software launched recently. SourceLabs announced Swik.net and Ugi Cei unveiled the OSZone.org. Both of these sites provide a searchable index of OSS projects. Both sites are wiki-based and content is community driven. Each provides RSS feeds so you can keep up-to-date with projects. Swik provides the ability to track lots of information about a project such as the mailing lists, bug tracker, and various related link URLs. OSZone is has a more limited (but more consistent) set of information. Both sites support tagging so folksonomies can develop, but OSZone also has a traditional classification hierarchy.


These sites join the O’Reilly/SpikeSource CodeZoo.com, Carlos Perez’s blog/wiki Manageability.org, and Java-Source.net as excellent sites to find projects.

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<head><title>Dynamic Log4J Control</title></head>
<body>
<h1>Dynamic Log4J Control</h1>
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<tr><th>Level</th><th>Logger</th><th>Set New Level</th></tr>
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Show <a href="log4j.jsp?showAll=true">all known loggers</a>
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