| | APRIL 20198CIOReviewI've been involved in open source software since I was a university student, both as a user and a contributor. Today, I'm a chief information officer in local government. While my day job is unrelated to my personal interest in open source software, I find leverage in many of the lessons I learned throughout my history in open source software projects.Let me first share my background. I'm of an age that I used MS-DOS when I was growing up. MS-DOS was pretty much the workhorse operating system of the 1980s and early 1990s. If you had a desktop computer in the office, the odds were good that the computer ran on MS-DOS.As an undergraduate physics student in the early 1990s, I used MS-DOS for everything. I wrote papers in a DOS word processor, I analyzed physics lab data using a DOS spreadsheet, and wiled away my free time by playing DOS games. I considered myself a DOS power user. So I was understandably upset when, in 1994, I read in technology magazines that Microsoft planned to do away with MS-DOS with the next release of Windows.And so I decided to create the FreeDOS Project, an open source software project to create a free version of DOS. FreeDOS caught the interest of many developers, and in over the next few weeks, dozens of developers from around the globe joined our growing open source software project.Since 1994, I have served as the Coordinator of the FreeDOS Project. In this capacity, I helped bring developers together to collaborate on programs, created "vision" statements and other documentation to get us all pointed in the same direction, and I oversaw each release of the FreeDOS Operating System, from Alpha 1 in 1994 to version 1.2 in December 2016.FreeDOS is only one part of my open source software experience. I have served as founder and coordinator of several open source projects, and contributed as a developer to dozens more: the GNOME desktop, a music player, a game, a compiler, an editor, and other programs. And in working in open source software, I have learned many lessons about leadership that I apply every day in my professional career. I'd like to share three key lessons from open source software that I've carried into my career as chief information officer:Feedback is a giftEvery software project, whether open source software or traditional "closed source" software, will have bugs. There is no program so perfect that it is without bugs. In open source By Jim Hall, CIO, Ramsey CountyLEADERSHIP LESSONS FROM OPEN SOURCE SOFTWAREJim HallIN MYOPINION
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