Have you swikked yet?

For the past 5 months I have been talking to SourceLabs about open source. They are a promising startup offering support for commonly used open source. The research I have read consistently shows lack of support as the largest inhibitor of open source adoption.

To make themselves known to the open source community, SourceLabs decided to give something back. That something is swik. Swik is a little hard to describe, thus the title of this post – have you swikked yet? It is a combination of del.icio.us, freshmeat, and an open source themed wikipedia. Its aim is to be a repository of knowledge about open source projects. Like wikipedia, anyone can edit anything. Like freshmeat, it has information on open source projects. Like del.icio.us it is a social network. The hope is it will provide some much needed meta information about projects, and be more than freshmeat and do more than sourceforge search.

A lot of thought has been put into swik. Search for a project. If it does not exist, swik’s robots will go out to the usual places and discover information about it. On its own this makes using swik useful. But if others come along and add extra information then it becomes quite valuable. I encourage you to get behind swik and make it work.

By Greg Luck

As Terracotta’s CTO, Greg (@gregrluck) is entrusted with understanding market and technology forces and the business drivers that impact Terracotta’s product innovation and customer success. He helps shape company and technology strategy and designs many of the features in Terracotta’s products. Greg came to Terracotta on the acquisition of the popular caching project Ehcache which he founded in 2003. Prior to joining Terracotta, Greg served as Chief Architect at Australian online travel giant Wotif.com. He also served as a lead consultant for ThoughtWorks on accounts in the United States and Australia, was CIO at Virgin Blue, Tempo Services, Stamford Hotels and Resorts and Australian Resorts and spent seven years as a Chartered Accountant in KPMG’s small business and insolvency divisions. He is a regular speaker at conferences and contributor of articles to the technical press.