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One thing I noticed since I started researching open source software (OSS) for the purpose of my IT investment research practice last fall is that you can't tell the OSS players apart without a scorecard. By the very nature of the OSS movement, the structure of the OSS community and its intertwined business model looks like an old piece of pre-Y2K COBOL spaghetti code. This graphic summarizes and compares the basic differences between initial OSS code, and the organization responsible for it, and the sponsoring commercial organization (only a few OSS projects have none, at least only a few that you would care about). Some of the sponsorships are straightforward and some are byzantine (we need a spell checker here).

For example, Mozilla is OSS portal code worked on by the Mozilla Foundation backed by the Mozilla Corporation; Mozilla in turn was originally spun out of AOL/Netscape. And that is one of the simpler examples. The Linux operating system kernel comes initially from the Linux Foundation (see my January 24 post), which in turn is sponsored by H-P, IBM, Novell and others, and eventually ends up in almost every other type of packaged OSS infrastructure code. A spreadhseet listing specific codesets, communities and commercial backers is available on my web site (see link to the right under "My Work Elsewhere"). The spreadsheet uses these categories: OSS applications, OSS databases, OSS middleware, OSS operating software and OSS toolsets and includes accompanying commentary I wanted to keep track of (such as the factoid that the guy providing the commercial backing for Ubuntu has been to the International Space Station as a paying customer on Soyuz).

This is a work in process so I will make a note on this blog every time I make a major change to the spreadsheet. So far I have identified and categorized about 25 OSS codesets by this taxonomy (sorry, that's what old IDC analysts do--and young ones too). There are hundreds of other OSS codesets but I have--in this case--taken the perspective of my investment research customers rather than developers in that I am most interested in OSS codesets that have financial-market potential. But if you would like to add your favorite OSS code, let me know via the comments section below.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Development |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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