Enterprise open source Toolkit

BT joins enterprise open-source community

David Meyer ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 24 Jul 2008 11:52 BST

BT has joined FossBazaar, an enterprise open-source community and workgroup of the Linux Foundation.

The communications and IT giant has already been a member of the Linux Foundation since 2005. According to a Wednesday statement, BT joined FossBazaar because it wants to help "accelerate the adoption of free and open-source software in business". Apart from the Linux Foundation, other sponsors of FossBazaar include HP, Novell, Google and SourceForge.

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BT is joining as a strategic partner. According to the statement, the company will "dedicate free consultancy time and assistance to the forum, in addition to contributing to whitepapers". BT said the extra investment in free and open-source software (Foss) ties into the company's move "from being a traditional telco to a software-driven communications services company".

"Open source is vital to BT's transformation and the wider software community at large," said Jeremy Ruston, BT's open-source innovation chief, on Wednesday. "We hope that our active community of software developers at BT continue to develop free and open-source software."

In its statement, BT also said it was "committed to using free and open-source software throughout its entire organisation".