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As promised, I followed up last Thursday's blog (Feb 15) about the new Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) by "meeting" with Barry Klawans, OSA spokesperson and CTO at JasperSoft. As noted Jaspersoft is one of the founding members. I am happy to say there is meat to go with motherhood and apple pie I mentioned last week.

As I mentioned they are paying attention to the real applications (as opposed to tools and infrastructure) that the open source software (OSS) movement needs to take off. Their mantra is more about interoperability than my post last week would have indicated and they are espousing vendor neutral in terms of "come on, come all." I had surmised that "vendor neutral" might mean they would be developing a framework like PeopleTools among themselves. Barry admits that would be nice to have but wants someone to come along with a product to donate to the community or the desire to take a framework on as a project. Most likely they will work with pieces of various frameworks rather than adopting only one such as Red Hat JBoss' JEMS or the enhanced LAMP stack likely to emerge from various Apache efforts.

From an integration software user point of view (based on the subject of ebizQ; of course if you are an integration software user, you use other stuff that needs to be integrated), this group has identified exactly what the open source application market needs to break out. The idea that there might someday be an OSS equivalent of SAP does not make sense because it goes against the whole OSS-based open choice philosophy: one from column A, one from column B, etc. But the OSS movement needs an OSS Netweaver (or Fusion or whatever Microsoft is calling Project Green these days). If you know anyone that is working on such a framework, let me know and I'll chase them down. I am already following JBPM and a few others.

(More on Jaspersoft in a later post. It seems to be a good example of how people, proprietary products and OSS projects come together to move the ball down field. Barry mentioned how they made use of OSS software to develop their OSS software in the same way that Progress had mentioned Tuesday (see Feb 20 post) that it used OSS software to develop its traditional products (not sure if I am going to adopt the term closed source)).

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