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Unfortunately I got “iced out” of traveling down to the LinuxWorld East event in NYC yesterday and today so I am trying to catch up virtually. Ice temporarily locked up my windshield wipers between Worcester and Hartford and driving into the metro NY area with my hand out the window to try to emulate the wipers just didn’t seem prudent.

From a distance, the most interesting news of the event looks to be the creation of an organization called the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) and the first name-brand endorsement of that organization by Unisys. Such attention to real applications (as opposed to tools and infrastructure) is just what the open source software (OSS) movement needs and four of the members of the group meet that criteria:
• Adaptive Planning—4-year-old suppliers of a budgeting/analytics product
• Centric CRM—7-year-old CRM software provider
• Jaspersoft—7-year-old OSS report-writer community that morphed into a BI application in 2005
• OpenBravo—a 6-year-old ERP supplier
Of this group of four, all but JasperSoft have adopted the OSS business model either partially or totally after beginning as more traditional ISVs. As for the other charter members of OSA, they are tools/infrastructure software developers or software distributors.

I am not sure what “driving the adoption of comprehensive solutions” means but just putting the four applications together would provide a manufacturer or services company so inclined with a fairly complete enterprise applications “suite,” if deployed along with OpenOffice, under OSS license terms (i.e., so-called free). Note that the companies employ various differing OSS license structures. It is also unclear whether the user would have to go to each individual supplier if the user wanted service and support or if some combined entity that is part of OSA could help. Presumably, that’s where Unisys could come in as well.

Initially, OSA says in its press release, it will focus on defining and promoting tools, frameworks, and best practices for deployment and interoperability. In other words, the group wants to reverse engineer the equivalent of ABAP, PeopleTools, or their more modern equivalents such as SAP NetWeaver or Oracle Fusion. I am guessing that wanting their own framework rather than being tied to JBoss or an equivalent is what they mean by “vendor neutral.” But since some of the members are already hooked up with the Eclipse consortium, tying up with IBM Community WebSphere (nee Gluecode) would get the framework-building process moving faster.

OSA said it also supports motherhood and apple pie (and not all members are even American). Motherhood: It will “build “meta-communities” by partnering on projects that involve a variety of companies, communities and individuals to drive innovation and collaboration.” Apple pie: It will “coordinate joint marketing campaigns to raise the awareness of business-hardened, open source applications and solution suites.”

A key factor that Unisys brings is helping the OSS community understand the requirements of a mission-critical enterprise application suite.

Once I thaw out I’ll find out more.

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

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