Most commercial vendors' first reaction to an open-source project is usually, "If it's free, it can't be better than the stuff you pay for." This presentation looks at the ICU project, an open-source project with a non-viral licensing agreement. We will discuss what this product is all about, why IBM decides to open-source the product and how it can work in reality.

We will first explore the features in the current release of ICU. We will also cover the open-source development process of ICU and the upcoming new features in the future releases. Take a few active participants for example, why did they decide to join the ICU development effort to address not only its immediate needs, but also the future prospect of their own Unicode enabled products, including Lotus, Progress and RealNames. In filling the desired missing features in ICU, we will talk about the lessons we have learned from those experiences. From that perspective, how the ICU development team has worked together to achieve the goals for all participants.

Although we are only demonstrating some specific examples of the ICU open-source development effort, the work and considerations are a representative of the other open-source process. Many discussion points will be interesting to any software vendors looking to take advantage of the open-source technologies in their products.