HP Labs Tech Report: Progressive Open Source

This interesting paper describes Progressive Open Source (POS), a software engineering paradigm that tries to leverage the power of proven Open Source methods and tools within "normal" software engineering organizations and with their partners. "Corporate Source", i.e. shared corporate source code and by this means code review / shared code ownership are central to this approach.

The software reuse community has long promoted the notions of interface-exposing and implementation-hiding component-oriented software reuse. However, implementation hiding has a strong limitation: an interface can never completely specify its implementation.

Similarities between the typical scientific process and the Open Source process can be noted: the primary motivation for people involved in the process is a quest for knowledge and peer recognition. Through this "psychological trick" the main obstacle to collaboration, communication and sharing between different teams/departments/subsidiaries can be overcome: NIH (not invented here).