Wal-Mart Returns To FLOSS, Sort Of…

“This past week, Wal-Mart Stores WMT -0.37%, one of the largest retailers in the world proved it once again when they announced that they would make their application lifecycle management tool OneOps available as an open source project. Why give away something that you created yourself that gives your company an advantage? Because companies like Wal-Mart and General Electric GE -0.35% (with their Open Innovation initiative) are finding that proprietary is being beat by collaboration and openness. Turning a company’s proprietary work into something shared in the market can reap benefits as others also help innovate and return new features and functionality to your work.”
 
See Wal-Mart Proves Open Source Is Big BusinessRemember when Walmart sold GNU/Linux computers? Perhaps you’re too young… Well, Wal-mart is dabbling in FLOSS again, this time producing it. They’ve made a nifty bit of software and rather than keeping it to themselves they are sharing it under a FLOSS licence. That allows them to share the cost of further development, make friends and influence people and other good things for a business. It’s one small step for Wal-mart, and one giant leap for mankind.