Netage is committed to support open source software development and the development of open standards by providing contributions, communicating findings and taking part in working groups.
Netage has a strong history of contributing to open-source projects and working groups. A lot of software that is used to provide our services is open-source software. In the spirit of supporting the tools that we use we regularly contribute back to community driven projects. Although open-source software in general is free it takes a investment in both time and money to contribute to the community. These communities are very important to the smaller more specific products and require the attention. It is very important to recognize that open-source software does not bring license costs, but that does not mean there are no costs at all.
The foundation of open-source software is the ability to communicate using open standards, both for the infrastructure as well for the data communication. These open standards contributed for a large part to the success of the solutions we have build at customer sites. It allows us to adapt to new demands easily and run the solutions in new environments.
As a W3C member, we actively participate in various working groups to support these standardization efforts in the field of Semantic Web and emergency data management. Not only does this allow us to help determine the standards, it also makes sure we have a competitive edge because we are part of the design process from very early on.