Open Collaboration within Corporations Using Software Forges

This article describes our experiences using open source software development practices at SAP. SAP is a major software developer and leader in business applications. We've found that open source practices can complement traditional top-down software development with bottom-up collective intelligence. Software forges offer a mechanism for advancing the adoption of open source best practices within corporations. We illustrate our experiences using SAP's own internal software forge, called SAP Forge, and compare our experiences with those from other large software companies.