Principal Investigators:
Open Source Software Foundry (OSSF) is a sub-project of Taiwan national "Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) Promotion Initiative. It is partially funded by MOEA/IDB, NSC and Academia Sinica, Taiwan.
The work of OSSF has three major thrusts:
- Build a public arena to stimulate and support sharing of software, knowledge and expertise among software developers and industry,
- Assist our industries and government to spread the usage of FOSS products and the associated development process. Also, create new businesses and strengthen existing ones by exploiting FOSS, and
- Help to expand the breadth and depth of our FOSS talents and expertise.
By so doing, OSSF assists Taiwan to become a strategic place in FOSS industry and a major contributor of FOSS worldwide.
The OSSF's website is an information repository of numerous resources for all users in all aspects of free software. Currently, it contains:
- OpenFoundry, a FOSS repository and management system where one can access many of Taiwan's FOSS projects and create FOSS projects of one's own;
- A database on Taiwan open source software (FOSS) talents and experts;
- Documents on intellectual property issues, together with LicenseWizard, a web-based tool to assist in the selection of FOSS license agreement;
- Resource catalogs in selected areas, including embedded software, enterprise computing, and Chinese language processing;
- Announcements on FOSS-related conferences and events; and
- Bi-weekly electronic publication of OSSF, Open Source Newsletter.
The OpenFoundry is developed, operated and maintained by OSSF. It is an easy-to-use platform that enables close collaboration among FOSS communities, academia, and industry. It has been open to public since 2003. The platform offers users many software development and project management tools, including tools for version control, release control, forum, issue tracker, and kwiki, and others. OpenFoundry also intends to assist researchers and developers in transforming their software creation into mature prototypes.
For this purpose and for the purpose of documenting individual contributions, OSSF will provide accountability measurement tools to help track, summarize and record activities in project development processes. Openfoundy itself is built upon free software and has been released under MIT License in 2008 April.
In addition to collaborations with FOSS communities, OSSF also work with government, academic, research institutes and industry in the release of their software source code under FOSS licenses. An emphasis of OSSF work is on the analyses of FOSS licenses and national policies worldwide. It provides training courses to users and helps project owners in making their choices of FOSS licenses.
OSSF conducts surveys on local FOSS communities, designs training courses, and holds workshops. OSSF also studies well-known free and open source software projects and highlights their successful experiences in OSSF publications in order to encourage Taiwan software developers to join FOSS.
