Last week the Talent First Network announced the launch of a new monthly publication geared toward greater understanding and dialogue between businesses and open source software projects. The free monthly's title is Open Source Business Resource, and it's geared toward the local business, open source, and academic communities in Ontario, Canada, though if it does well, there are plans to expand it beyond the region.
The OSBR's goal is to be a resource for students and professionals who want to work with open source software in a business atmosphere. Because there are so many sources of misinformation on this subject, such a publication is a necessary resource for professionals. This month's issue (PDF) deals with a variety of interesting business-oriented open source topics, such as using open source software as a competitive advantage, an overview of why and how the Eclipse project has been successful, a piece that explains all of the properties of an open source software license that businesses should consider, an introduction to Talent First and the Open Source Business Resource, and a listing of lead projects in Ontario.
In charge of the OSBR editorially is Dru Lavigne, who has also been one of the driving forces behind the BSD Certification Group, a speaker at many open source software conventions, and the author of O'Reilly's BSD Hacks, among other things.
Overall, the OSBR is a decently organized newsletter with useful information written by actual industry professionals that is easy to read and understand. I think it's an excellent implementation of an open source software resource for local Ontario businesses, college students, and professional programmers. Sometimes great works don't succeed, though, so time will tell if this format and content will find all of its readers and grow beyond Ontario to reach a larger audience. Being that the alternatives, in the form of blogs and news articles, are wildly inconsistent and frequently misleading or factually incorrect, I certainly hope that the OSBR succeeds.
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