I just returned from a trip to Japan, and among the discussion topics was uncertainty about the current economic situation and its impact of software development teams. Software teams have always been asked to do more with less, but it may really be the case now if the business climate weakens further. All of which leads to the point that open source is a very viable strategy today to get more value from development or IT dollars. My friend Ismael Ghalimi from Intalio has written his take on it here from the perspective of application level open source products. The same applies to open source components used as part of a development project. The experience we have in looking at content of commercial software products indicates that leading software firms are already fifty percent or more open source based on lines of code. So if you want to stay competitive as a software development organization – now is the time to adopt a broad strategy for open source use. And our point of course is that a broad use strategy brings with it Intellectual Property and vulnerability risks that are new to most organizations. Dealing with them is a combo of policy, education, process and tools – and informal systems won’t keep up with the scope of use I’m talking about here.