Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Open source software is making its way into education. Even though using open source software for educational purposes is nothing new, we observe an increased demand for it across higher education institutions. Why now, and why such a surge in interest? Well, there is hardly any industry that didn’t experience an impact made by the pandemic. The conclusion across the board is almost unanimous: the future is digital, and it’s approaching us at a greater speed than ever before.

Quill, a team chat company with $16 million in venture capital funding, was acquired by Twitter and shut down their product last week. Users were given a mere four days to export their data prior to deletion; direct messages and private channels could not be exported at all. Our sympathies go out to Quill users, whose needs were given so little consideration in this deal.

Tracking employee work hours can help businesses measure employee productivity, make better estimates for multiple projects, and manage payroll. That’s why most freelancers, startups, and large businesses turn to time tracking software. But if you’re on a limited budget and want a flexible tool that adapts to your business needs, open source time tracking software can be your solution. An open source tool is usually free to use and is available without a commercial license.

Mattermost Boards started as an innovation project that came up during a hackathon we held in late 2020. At Mattermost, we’re focused on helping the world build better software by aligning teams, tools, and processes. We work like most other software development teams do, with stuff all over the place — in chat, emails, Google Docs, and systems like Jira and GitHub.

Sara is an SEO Strategist at Rocket.Chat. She is passionate about topics around digital transformation, workplace experience, open source, and data privacy and security. Sara Ana Cemazar Open-source software is undoubtedly gaining traction. Even though the open-source community has been active in their promotion of open source advantages for years, there have never been more open-source projects in use than today.

There is a Cambrian explosion currently underway in the collaboration tools space. The exponential rise in remote working as a result of naturally evolving workplaces and aided by the recent pandemic has created an opportunity for lots of different collaboration tools to take center stage. As our collaboration tools improve, work that would have been nearly impossible to do remotely is becoming more and more common.

Welcome to the first edition of Open Source Matters: our regular publication about the latest happenings in open source! Let’s dive into the news.