Open Source done right.

Open Tech Strategies provides expert advice and services to help organizations use the advantages of open source to reach their goals.

Services.

Our clients come to us for assistance launching, joining, evaluating, or influencing open source software projects, and sometimes because they seek transformative change along open source principles for their own organizations.

Open Source Licensing, Development Strategy, Developer Coaching, Release Processes
Open Source Software Development
Open Source Independent Verification and Validation
(OS IV&V)
Non-profit Boot Up, Fiscal Sponsorship, Grant Fundraising
Partner Coordination / Consortium Design
Project Management
RFP Drafting and Responses
Due Diligence and Review of Companies and Projects
Community-based Development, Staffing
Code-a-thons, Developer Gatherings
Standards development

The Team.

Our partners and staff draw on decades' worth of experience to provide professional guidance that enables our clients to navigate the technical, cultural, and legal landscape of open source with confidence and repeatability.

Photo of James Vasile

James Vasile — Partner

> james {AT} opentechstrategies.com

James Vasile has fifteen years experience as a user, developer, advocate and advisor in the free and open source software world. His expertise is in software licensing and community-building, as well as non-profit and small business startup. He focuses on free software and open source production, although his work and interests often take him far beyond the world of software. Much of what James does involves teaching people how to build successful businesses around free software and ensuring licensing alignment in multisource FOSS stacks. James's technical experience also allows him to act as outsource CTO/Architect, due-diligence open source expert, new venture advisor, convening facilitator, and more.

James currently serves on the governing or advisory boards of Horizons, Brave New Software, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In addition to his work with OTS, James was the founding Director of the Open Internet Tools Project, which during his tenure originated a variety of excellent community-based projects. These include Techno-Activism Third Mondays (a meetup that gathers people in over 20 cities around the world every month), the Circumvention Tech Festival (which has become the Internet Freedom Festival), and a 1000+ volunteer translation project now know as Localization Lab. He was also a founding board member of Overview Services, which made open source software that powers Pulitzer-winning data journalism.

Previously, James was a Senior Fellow at the Software Freedom Law Center, where he advised and supported a wide range of free software efforts.

James was a Director of the FreedomBox Foundation. He helped boot up and served on the board of Open Source Matters, the non-profit behind Joomla. He remains active in several technology development efforts. His FreedomBox work has been recognized by an Innovation Award at Contact Summit 2011 as well as an Ashoka ChangeMaker's award for Citizen's Media.

James frequently speaks and writes about technology trends and free software. You can learn more about him from his GitHub activity and his LinkedIn profile, or by connecting with him on Mastodon or Twitter.

Photo of Karl Fogel

Karl Fogel — Partner

> kfogel {AT} opentechstrategies.com

Karl Fogel has been an open source developer, author, project manager, and specialist in collaborative development techniques since 1992.

In 1995, he and Jim Blandy co-founded Cyclic Software, the first company offering commercial support for CVS, the free software version control system; in 1997 he added support for anonymous read-only repository access to CVS. In 1999 he wrote Open Source Development With CVS (Coriolis OpenPress). From 2000-2006, he worked for CollabNet, Inc as a founding developer in the Subversion project. In 2005 he wrote Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project (O'Reilly Media).

He has since been an open source specialist at Google, at Canonical Ltd (where he helped release the Launchpad.net code), at O'Reilly Media, and at Code for America/ Civic Commons, where he worked with non-profits and government agencies to release and manage open civic technology projects. Karl has also been a board member at the Open Source Initiative, an Open Internet Tools Project Fellow at the New America Foundation, and is a member of the Apache Software Foundation.

In addition to his books, some of his articles on collaborative development are: “Teams and Tools”, “Dissecting The Myth That Open Source Software Is Not Commercial”, “What's the Return on Investment for Open?”, “What Is Free Software?”, “Open source mistakes for enterprise newcomers” (with James Vasile), and “Be Open from Day One, not Day N”.

Further information can be found in his GitHub, Twitter, and Identi.ca accounts, among other places.


Resources.

These resources about starting and managing open source projects were either produced by Open Tech Strategies, or were written by or with significant involvement from people now at OTS.

Jobs.

OTS has no open positions currently. To review older job postings that are now closed, see our Jobs Archive.

Get in touch.

OTS collaborates all over the world with clients in industry, government and the non-profit sector. We look forward to working with you!

There are lots of ways to reach us. The fastest and most direct is by joining our chat server at chat.opentechstrategies.com. This is where OTS staff, clients, and friends collaborate and socialize. Please do drop in, even just to say hi. We are always eager to include new people in our community! Zulip chat

info {AT} opentechstrategies.com
+1 (312) 857-6361