A rising tide lifts all boats in the Silicone Harbour, and many Charleston tech companies are floating on a sea of free and open source software. Let’s see who’s adding water to the pond and who is keeping it in carefully-labelled jars, locked away from the world in the manner of Howard Hughes.
Blackbaud – FOSS Grade: a solid B
An impressive array of repos from this Charleston tech stalwart. Lots of Visual Basic specific to Blackbaud products, but a fair bit of Java and a sprinkling of PHP and JS mixed in.
Oddly, the only person listed in the organization is one Blackbaud-BobbyEarl who we can only assume is this appropriately-bearded individual.
The project of most general interest maybe Stache, some kind of node-based ‘documentation builder’. The Early of Bobby has been hacking away on this almost daily over the last couple of weeks. Looking forward to seeing the sweet, sweet docs that convert a cold broth of code into a warm soup of useful FOSS contribution.
Jack Russell Software – FOSS Grade: ?
Forks, internal projects, and the jackhq website. But nothing updated since 2012? What gives? The list of FOSS projects on the company site is promising. Maybe everything lives within the Great Electron that is Tom Wilson? Can somebody from JR give us a read on this?
PeopleMatter – FOSS Grade: C-, barely passing
A paltry 2 repos, neither of which has seen a commit in 2015. One is a fork of a Spring SAML thinger. The other is more interesting – a well-documented jQuery plugin for efficient long scrolling lists. Respect to Scott Martin and Andrew Whitaker for givin’ back a little something something.
BenefitFocus – FOSS Grade: F
No github presence at all? Only FOSS contribution seems to be a blog entry shouting at the community about commenting standards.
PokitDok – FOSS Grade: A-
Mostly a collection of API clients, but in a wide variety of languages. Need medical pricing data in your Haskell or Lua app? This is the place to come. Most repos updated wihin the last few days.
Of less specific interest is gremlin-python, a library for adding python syntax support for traversing property graphs via rexster (I think).
Possibly the best collection of github avatars of any #chstech org. Gotta love the ‘kidrecursive’ handle.
This would be an A, but I suspect that there are other projects lurking around the PD shoppe that could be put in the public domain.
PhishLabs – FOSS Grade: F
SPARC – FOSS Grade A-.
A wide variety of forks, internal projects, and presentations. Activity infrequent and not that recent, though. Maybe Booze Allen are bringing down the show?
Most interesting project is TurbineDB, a Scala-based time series database for analytics. Looks like the boys from Daniel Island were (or are?) thinking about spinning this out as a standalone business. They managed 17 followers with one tweet, somehow.
Take issue with our assessment or find it lacking? I urge you take your ramblings to us on Twitter so that we can argue in public. It’s more fun that way.
Shrimp And Bits 