I recently wrote an article for DATAVERSITY profiling three leading data visualization tools available for free. For someone who was originally skeptical of the open source movement when it first appeared in the 90s, it is amazing the amount of quality, useful software available for free…
…including the blogging platform used by this very website!
Sponsorship Vital for Open Source Success
Of course, developers and designers need to be fed, so most larger open source initiatives thrive on the support they receive from venture capital companies, the government, or other commercial entities.
On the other hand, the Apache Software Foundation is a highly successful non-profit company formed to incubate a variety of software and database projects. The NoSQL movement would look a lot different without Apache’s contribution (Hadoop, Cassandra, CouchDB, etc.).
Gephi, one of the cool data visualization tools I profiled for DATAVERSITY has a host of interesting sponsors grouped together in a consortium. They include everyone from technology behemoth, Google, to graph database upstarts, Neo Technology.
Gephi is a cool open source data viz tool supported by a consortium of interesting backers.
When you leverage the power of an open source software tool or platform, take a minute to thank the software engineers responsible for the work, but also the folks who sponsor and support the open source community.