More on Open Source Ecosystems

There are other sites out there discussing the phrase 'open source ecosystems'. Here are a few interesting ones:

• An interesting post by one of the guys who helped develop Ruby on Rails, which is a great new OSS language for Web 2.0.


• A news article about the importance of third parties such as Pervasive to form an ecosystem around open source projects (in this case around PostgreSQL.


• A 2005 research article by IBM stating (among other things) that an open source project "needs to build an ecosystem" in order to reach a critical mass for viability.


• What looks like a wiki-evolving definition (or is that 'wikivolving'- is that a word yet? should I TM it?) of an open source business ecosystem on ObjectWeb.


• A blog from a guy whose job is Director of Ecosystem Development for the Eclipse Foundation. (I ought to try to ring him up sometime just for a chat)


• A presentation on Collaboratively Evolving Ecosystems in the context of government-sponsored open source projects, essentially laying out the case for moving from "N*build to 1*build + N*improve" (an interesting way to look at the benefits of OSS.

All this to suggest that I am certainly not the originator of the term nor the only one interested in it. Here's hoping I can add to the conversation in a truly meaningful way.