As you probably have noted if you read my blog, City of Malmö likes open source. Our dashboard, news, blogs and wiki run on open source, and it all runs on Linux servers.
In order to be true to the open source philosophy, City of Malmö now makes its open source builds of the intranet available on GitHub.
You need an intranet dashboard? Why not try ours, built in Rails! Does our assets approach sound interesting? Download it and look for yourself! You want to reuse some of our mediawiki and wordpress end user design ideas? It is all there to use! All we ask is that you in turn also share the great things you build.*
Using open source has a lot of positive effects. Some examples of what we have seen in my organization:
- Software quality. The open source things we have done on the intranet keep running, day by day. The cost of maintenance is minimal.
- Simple customization. It is easy to tweak the open source software to suit our needs, and the code is adhering to open standards. This has for example made it possible to build a responsive intranet the way we want it.
- No vendor lock-in. Since open source software does not require an initial choice of and costly purchase of platform, we can introduce new functions and intranet sections by trying it out in a small scale and then scale up if we like the results. We can also follow our Best of Breed-philosophy.
- Speedy development and quick results. Open source is ideal when you want to have iterative development and avoid big projects. Open source also means plenty of cost free community developed choices when adding functionality. No need to wait for the vendor to prioritize your needs.
Some background on open source:
- 10 Reasons Open Source Is Good for Business – PCWorld
- Benefits Of Open Source Code – OSS Watch
- Open Source Case for Business – Open Source Initiative
- Five Pros and Five Cons of Open Source Software – CIO Insight
- Advantages And Disadvantages Of Open Source – CloudTweaks
- Open Source (Almost) Everything
* The things we have created is released under the AGPL license. Basically this means you have to open source your own releases of our forked builds.
Jesper Bylund – Intranet Manager 
Nicely done! Not only are you doing great work for your organisation, you’re benefiting the whole community.
You’re a star! 🙂
Thank you, James!!! 😀
Very nice initiative.
Thanks, Jane! I’m glad you like it!
Well done Jesper!
Anyone interested in more Opens Source Stuff for intranets, check out Region Västra Götalands massive Google Code library: http://code.google.com/p/oppna-program/
Thanks, Kristian!
You have an impressive Open Source collection!
Interesting article. In my opinion, open source software solutions grow in popularity even if they are still considered by some as ‘false economy’ solutions. I’m currently working at TALCOD (French Open source and Web agency), and all the customers seem satisfied with the solutions and Intranets that we base on Drupal. I do believe that open source solutions have a bright future.
@marie I also believe in Open Source!!!