I have written here and here (see "moving up the stack") about the importance of applications to the growth of the open source software (OSS) movement and the importance of services (or components if you prefer) to applications.

Black Duck combines the trends in an announcement on January 28.

The company calls it the “Black Duck Code Center” and its part of Black Duck’s line up of products that address life cycle management and application development in an era when pieces of code are “flying in” (pardon the pun) from all over under a variety of terms and conditions (Ts&Cs), including OSS Ts&Cs. Black Duck anticipates general availability by March 31.

One issue Black Duck is addressing is like but not exactly the same as the issue discussed recently on the Open Source Initiative (OSI) license-discuss list and with John Roets. OSI members and Roets were discussing a trend where company management, especially legal departments, were not allowing more software into enterprises if it was licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) because of some of the license’s Ts&Cs. Black Duck says it is seeing situations where enterprises are not allowing any OSS into the shop--or are worried about its dissemination within the enterprise--for similar reasons.

Black Duck’s functionality is like but not exactly the same as the governance software HP announced the week of January 21 and the OpenLogic Discover software. Black Duck goes broader and deeper than the others based on my quick look. For example, their “search” software does not care whether it’s looking for OSS or not and the knowledge base that results can have other than OSS poured into it.

One key point however: Black Duck itself does not OSS its product at this time.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Development | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I started writing a blogpost with that title ten months ago. Subsequently I found so much anti-marketing thinking among the open source software (OSS) community that I let it drop as a research issue. If everyone was anti-marketing then marketing would not be a dynamic in user decision making and therefore not worth me researching.

It began when I "attended" the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 event and some subsequent research led me to LinuxWatch's discussion of the event. But I started asking myself the question again in January 2008 when I read Matthew Aslett’s article, “Can LoopFuse crack the open source conversion conundrum?,” on the 451 web site because maybe now almost a year later the community is beginning to realize it needs to better understand how markets work.

Red Hat, at its March 14, 2007 event, began a discussion about RHEL by bashing Microsoft. In his article, Steven Vaughn-Nichols waited until the second sentence to do the same. I wondered, “What does upgrading a UNIX server (RHEL 4 to RHEL 5) have to do with why someone would or would not upgrade from XP to Vista on a client?” There appears to be no thought given to the marketing message OSS companies are putting out and the press of course parrots back what the companies say. When talking to financial analysts and IT investment research folks like me, Red Hat is always careful to position itself as trying to migrate users from other UNIX systems, not from Windows systems.

In Aslett’s article, he anonymously talks about an OSS startup that apparently maintains a web site, provides samples of its (presumably dual-licensed) OSS product, uses a press person or PR agency, and analyzes leads. But he quotes the anonymous company’s executive as saying it “would have cost in the region of $2m in marketing to get… leads if the company was not open source.” Does the company not realize that all the activities it apparently conducts in order to save marketing dollars are marketing?

That is not normal commercial behavior, nor is it a good way to get IT users to learn about OSS products:
-- Did you ever go into buy a Camry and have the car salesperson begin the pitch by telling you what's wrong with Harley Davidson?
-- Or go looking online for a new audio system and find the web site filled with criticism of HP photo printers.
Yet this approach is standard operating procedure in the OSS community.

As for the effect on my research agenda, I quickly found that all the well funded OSS pureplays and OSS-heritage hybrids were in fact aggressively marketing their wares (I'm sure the VCs insisted on it and told them which PR agencies to use). They run webinars and seminars and user groups and conduct "direct mail" as well as advertise via Google as well as via popular web sites like ebizQ. Successful OSS guys sure seem to like marketing.

By the way, if you regularly read this blog and web page, LoopFuse is not new news. We talked to Tom and Roy last fall primarily because we like the name LoopFuse and got some good advice to pass on to those thinking of becoming OSS developers while we were at it. They know what marketing can do for OSS.

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Between January 16 and January 23, there was an interesting discussion at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) “license-discuss list.” It turns out to be a good name for the list. As noted a few weeks ago, the OSI recently split its license-discuss list from the license-approval list because the group wanted to encourage just such give and take among newbies who had no need to get bogged down in the minutia and inside-baseball that comes into play in OSI license approval. Typically the latter concerns whether a particular company or license is strictly adhering to all 10 OSI commandments, whereas this OSI license-discuss participant just wanted some help getting his company to adopt more open source software (OSS).

The net of it is that his company’s “legal department… will not allow any use of GPL'ed software anymore in the company (except Linux)” [GPL, for those just tuning in, is the GNU General Public License, the most “free” of the dozens of different terms and conditions under which open source software (OSS) is licensed.] I saw a similar issue recently (not necessarily exactly the same) when I was “talking to” John Roets of createtank, developers of elemenope. Roets originally made his OSS code available to the world under GPL in 2003 but had to add the Apache license as an option in 2006 because of the objection of a large customer’s legal department against GPL.

According to the initial question to the OSI license-discuss list, the guy’s legal department says it “is an open question what constitutes/does not constitute distribution. Some consider on-site access/use by contractors to be distribution; and… the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has previously stated that remote access/use by contractors is distribution. The unfortunate part with the GPL is that it defines modifications broadly and, at least under v.2.1 of the GPL, linking to/with other programs whether dynamically or statically, is considered a modification.”

The lawyers continued, “The GPL, especially v. 3.0, contains provisions which are adverse to Company X's intellectual property right interests. What constitutes distribution is not clear, which is why internal use does not fully negate some of the more onerous provisions of the GPL (e.g., access/use by non-Company X employees is considered by some to be distribution; remote access by non-Company X employees is considered by almost all to be distribution).”

Among many responses, the OSI discuss-list member got some high-powered OSS guys to respond.
• Oft quoted Dutch patent attorney Arnoud Engelfriet gave the questioner the European Union view.
• Chris DiBona, Google’s OSS guru, suggested he ask his lawyers “what they know that Google doesn't.” He said Google uses “GPL'd code on our production, internal corporate and shipping on the search appliance.”
• Brian Behldenorf, one of the founders of both Apache and Collabnet, weighed in on a finer point of FSF legal history.

This kind of response would be like your asking a question about the rules of golf on golfdigest.com and getting answers from Tiger Woods, Ernie Els and Vijay Singh in a matter of a few hours. Or—-coming up on Super Bowl week--asking about some NFL rules and hearing back from Tom Brady and all the Mannings, including Archie.

By the way, although they were all probably involved in writing or approving the GPL and other OSS licenses, the OSS gurus’ advice was focused on how to work with the questioner’s lawyers. They weren’t giving legal advice.

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OpenLogic on January 22 released a list of its customers' most popular open source software (OSS) packages. Two interesting findings were that the Apache license is more common than the GNU General Public License (GPL), and that Hibernate and Struts topped the list of most popular packages "with more than 71 % of customers using each."

I have a call into OpenLogic to see if I can get some information on the survey's methodology. It does not surprise me that Apache is more popular than GPL. Hibernate is distributed with a Lesser GPL license (LGPL) but many of the rest of the leading projects on OpenLogic's lists are licensed under Apache (I think I can say most but I don't feel like doing the detailed research).

But why are the Apache HTTP server and Tomcat packages so relatively low on the OpenLogic list? I suspect it is something unique to the OpenLogic customer base. Similarly, the hit of last week's gala, MySQL, made the list but I do not see many other products that I would expect such as Alfresco, Firefox, Mule, and SugarCRM. I'll update this if I find out anything other than that the sample was skewed by the demographics of OpenLogic's customers.

But you can't blame OpenLogic. This press release reminds me that beginning next quarter we can hopefully expect more broad-based census information on OSS if users particpate. As discussed in this podcast with Kim Weins, Marketing VP at OpenLogic, the company is hoping to get wide participation in a cenus among anyone--OpenLogic client or not--who will use its OSS Discovery software, which can be downloaded at its site.

So for example, we will be able to find out with more statistical accuracy the answers to questions such as:
-- How prevalent is the LAMP stack vs. the WAMP stack (and WAOP and LAOP stacks for that matter?)?
-- How much OSS is truly free and how much is just open?
-- How quickly are open source ESB's permeating enterprises?
-- And many similar questions that users, managers, developers and investors care about and that I have written about in the Features section that accompanies this blog. In the long run, what would be most useful is a census that didn't make the distinction between open and closed source. That would settle a lot of arguments.

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Beginning in 2000 or so, brand name enterprise application integration (EAI) and later business process management (BPM) products were supposed to be all about connecting clients, prospects, suppliers, manufacturers, etc. all along the supply chain. But IT staffs tended to use them for internal integration instead, in places where less complex technology would work just as well. It's like the old saw that casual computer users use only 10% of the functionality of Notes, Office and similar personal-productivity tools.

I was reminded of this tendency of IT folks to overcomplicate their lives when I was researching ebizQ's latest article on open source software (OSS). As part of the research I talked to John Roets of createtank, a consultancy that has open sourced an interesting little framework named "elemenope." Interesting little name too.

We're not talking IBM SystemView or Sun's Distributed Object Environment here. In fact, just the opposite: keep it simple if simple is all you need is Roets' motto. Developed around the same time as these more comprehensive but now long forgotten frameworks (and before SOAP), elemenope follows the same design philosophy in terms of abstracting away from the underlying technology. It includes:
• A repository of connectors (might be XML RPC, might be SOAP call)
• A little engine that abstracts the transport
“Forced abstraction” keeps users from writing spaghetti code every time they add a new application or data source. There's “one pathway no matter what the logic is,” says John. And the next time you need to integrate something, you don’t have to go find the guy that wrote the original service.

Just to achieve this simplicity for its consulting practice, createtank wrote elemenope in the mid 1990s. They OSS'd it under the GNU General Public License (GPL) in 2003 and also under the Apache license in 2006. (More on that in my next blog post; perceived legal problems with GPL are a big issue over on the Open Source Initiative license-discuss list this week.)

By the way, there's more detail on elemenope as well as activeBPEL, Apache ODE, Intalio, Jitterbit, jBPM, Open EAI, Shark and Sun in the feature article on OSS referenced above. It's is available over there to the left of my bald head. (You need to join the ebizQ Gold Club but there is no charge.) The premise of the research is the possibility that OSS integration server software might change the dynamics of external EAI/BPM use in the next decade in the same way that OSS application/web server software (see Open Source at the Core) changed "internal" application integration functionality in the last decade. Let me know what you think of the theory.

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Marten Mickos, CEO of the about to be acquired MySQL, ended the January 16, 2007 morning press conference concerning Sun’s (JAVA) acquisition of MySQL by saying his “1000s of partners should find (the acquisition) excellent news.” That’s debatable when it comes to partners such as HP (HP), IBM (IBM), and Unisys who compete with Sun. Or Google (GOOG), which doesn’t like being too tightly tied to any of the big IT providers, which is why Google is one of the biggest financial supporters of—if not contributors to—the open source software (OSS) movement.

But the acquisition will be helpful to the MySQL community including the OSS-heritage hybrids we tend to talk to and talk about here most often on the ebizQ.net Open Source blog and in the ebizQ Open Source Feature Articles section. These include Alfresco, JasperSoft, Pentaho, Red Hat, SugarCRM, Talend and others. I have been writing both here and on Research 2.0 (see link to right) frequently in our year-end review articles about the convergence of the OSS community with the large enterprise software providers. Although Sun is one of those large providers, the good news is that Sun is the most committed of those providers to the OSS concept.

Sun’s in fact a “megaOSS company,” to coin a term. It has projects ongoing at all levels of the stack: Glassfish, openSolaris, OpenESB, openOffice, and so forth. It will certainly continue to provide the MySQL community similar support. And it has conditioned its shareholders already for the different way that OSS pays off on the income statement, the dependence on subscription maintenance and the apparently unprofitable relinquishing of intellectual property assets.

One thing I am concerned about is what this acquisition means for Sun’s other efforts in the OSS database field. Sun has contributed to both the JavaDB (Berkeley) and postgreSQL efforts. It says it will continue that participation but human nature argues against it. To the extent those communities depended on Sun, it’s time to investigate other options.

Perhaps they could do a “Google search” for possible new corporate sponsorship.

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It’s services oriented architecture (SOA) “framework” time in the open source software (OSS) community. For more on how the two buzzwords—SOA and OSS—interrelate, and even what they really mean, see my related feature article from November 2007. The new ingredient this year is the buzzword, framework. OSS-heritage players in the software market such as Mulesource, Red Hat (RHT) and WSO2 are trying to catch up with the proprietary-heritage OSS hybrids such as IBM (IBM), Oracle (ORCL), TIBCO (TIBX) and BEA (BEAS) in the SOA “platform” game. Proprietary-heritage OSS hybrid Iona made a similar announcement on December 12, 2007.

(Just for the record, our research shows users don’t care a wit about whether a company is an OSS pure play, an OSS-heritage OSS hybrid, or a proprietary-heritage OSS hybrid. But since the community blogosphere seems to like to keep track of such OSS virginity issues, we’ll play along.)

On January 14, WSO2 announced the debut of the WSO2 Web Services Framework for Ruby (WSF/Ruby), an OSS framework for providing and consuming Web services in the Ruby object-oriented programming language. On January 15, MuleSource announced a new subscription-only “enterprise-edition” packaging of the Mule Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) along with open-source governance and monitoring tools into an integration platform. (The announcement of an enterprise edition formally pushes Mulesource into the hybrid category decreasing the number of OSS pure plays further.) Given Iona’s December announcement of FUSE HQ, a solution based on OSS Hyperic that provides systems management and monitoring capabilities across all products in the FUSE family, we expect Red Hat to come in batting clean up any day now. Red Hat had previously promised a late fall rollout of its JBoss-centric SOA Platform when it announced JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2 in July 2007. It appears the leading OSS provider has instead waited in order to make the best feature/function response possible to the smaller organizations.

Everyone now perceives having a platform to be preferable to just offering some of the parts, such as an enterprise service bus (ESB), a registry/repository, or toolkit. Of course, as I said in my review of OSS in SOA, and as I said about the advent of the enterprise service bus in 2002, and as I said when proprietary vendors announced similar concepts 10 years ago using terms like Internet Application Components, S-O-A won’t matter much until we get some S’s.

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This post might belong more on a corporate law web page—or in a merger and acquisition (M&A) roundup—than on an open source software (OSS) blog. But buried in some intercontinental corporate merger and acquisition news this week was a couple of factoids that piqued my curiosity. One was the mention of Winston Damarillo, chairman of the two companies that merged: Exist Global, a software engineering services firm headquartered in the Philippines, and DevZuz, a developer of delivery platforms that link enterprise businesses to application development projects and processes. The other factoid was all the interconnected OSS aspects of the merger.

Winston is interesting because he is also a founder of Webtide and chairman of Morph Labs and was a founder of Gluecode, which was sold to IBM in 2005, and LogicBlaze, which was acquired by Iona in 2007. These companies have products that are outgrowths of Apache Software Foundation (ASF) or other OSS-related projects—the Jetty Java web container, the Amazon EC2 environment, the Geronimo application server and the Synapse integration broker respectively. The latter became IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, and part of Iona’s FUSE respectively.

So I had to catch up with Winston and ask him what commercial developments of OSS efforts we should expect out of the newly expanded Exist. His answer is a very interesting vision of a utility-based delivery grid for software projects being developed by programmers based all over the world. Exist has a project called DEN, DevZuz brings a project called CodeAtlas, and Mergere (which had previously been merged into Damarillo’s Simula Labs to form DevZuz) brings Maestro.

Don’t try to keep track of the M&A machinations; the interesting stuff is in putting it all together. Den uses Apache Maven, Continuum and Archiva. Ditto for Maestro which builds standardization, dependency management, continuous integration, and comprehensive reporting, into the grid. CodeAtlas offers a software sourcing repository technology that connects developers and software components in a social networking model where developers can “rank and rate” the work they are collaborating on as well as other projects they get involved in. This is MyFace for the OSS community (that analogy assumes I correctly understand what my grandkids are doing on MyFace).

More in my world, it looks like SourceForge meets Eclipse “in the cloud.” As such it allows ISVs to give and get extensions to their core work, partners to do Ajax etc., and offers advanced software expertise to large end users that might not be able to afford that expertise on staff or only need it for a finite length of time.

The combined entity will do business as Exist Global. Established in 2001, Exist Global, with more than 150 developers worldwide, is one of the largest strategic engineering services firm in East Asia. Winston is also a member of the Eclipse board so we are going to try to catch up with him for an upcoming podcast.

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According to a Red Hat spokesperson, the AP business writer who recently interviewed new Red Hat (RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst misunderstood some comments about Red Hat’s intentions in the applications portion of the open source software (OSS) business. Although the AP story lead with Whitehurst’s plans to be “the attacker” against Microsoft (MSFT) and Oracle (ORCL), the article also said that Whitehurst hopes to expand Red Hat “into software applications…” Red Hat had previously said it would expand across the program development/infrastructure layer of the information technology stack and not up the stack into OSS applications like business intelligence, enterprise content management, ERP, CRM and so forth.

However Red Hat told me I should not read anything in the interview as a change in Red Hat strategy. That’s good because a move up the stack would put Red Hat into competition with many of its OSS partners such as Pentaho, Jaspersoft, Alfresco, Compiere, SugarCRM and CentricCRM and retard the Red Hat Exchange concept further. The Exchange concept really hasn’t reached the potential of hundreds of solutions envisioned when it was announced. Only about a dozen partners are currently highlighted on the Red Hat Exchange site. To really be a factor in Red Hat’s future the Exchange has to take on the look of the Digital OEM catalog, circa 1978.

So putting the two themes together (attacking Microsoft/Oracle and not moving up the stack), to the extent Red Hat is going to attack Microsoft and Oracle, it is going to do it on Red Hat’s home field—the Unix/Linux infrastructure market. Even attacking Microsoft on those grounds is new news because previously Red Hat’s strategy has been all about migrating old-Unix-installations (e.g., HP-UX, AIX, Solaris) to Linux. To the extent Red Hat tries to start unplugging some Windows servers, things could get interesting. Attacking Oracle at the non-applications level is interesting for an entirely different set of dynamics, not the least of which is Oracle is basically delivering the same software as Red Hat on the operating system level and the same functionality as Red Hat JBoss on the middleware level. And Oracle has a very loyal installed base.

Mr. Whitehurst, Let the attacks begin!

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The open source software (OSS) blogosphere, amid the slow news period that always surrounds major holidays, has had no alternatives the last few weeks except to get tied up in knots over a Discover article that claims OSS inhibits innovation. There are many thoughtful responses on the Net, such as this one on Ars Technica. There is also the usual ranting of the OSS fringe and Free Software Foundation (FSF) members when anything negative about OSS is released.

I don't know the Discover article author's work. He is credited with coining the term virtual reality (VR), and that has never been part of my research focus. He founded a VR company called VPL whose IP was evenutally acquired by Sun. I found a very interesting interview on the Sun site where he uses some pretty obtuse terminology to say, as I have said, that software development is still a cottage industry, whether it be closed- or open-source software. My only connection to him is that he is said to have been involved with the great VR-oriented film, Minority Report, (although I tend to think more of MIT's John Underkoffler in this context).

According to the Discover article Lanier shared the same MIT/Cambridge timewarp as the FSF's Richard Stallman. Relative to OSS, it looks like Lanier is positioning himself as the anti-Stallman. His criticism of movements such as OSS is not a new area of criticism for him. He has penned pieces criticizing Wikipedia and like efforts as "Digital Maoism" and undue technology devotion in general as misguided totalitarianism and collectivsim.

So putting all of the politics and historical background aside, what does his Discover article really say about OSS and innovation? I don't think he says much about OSS at all other than that non-IT-related scientific pursuits should not follow the OSS development model. According to Lanier, other areas of scientfic research such as synthetic biology should stick to such things as focused teams of scientists and rigorous peer review. He gives one example of closed-source-software innovation--the iPhone--that I don't think of as very innovative. He gives another--Google's algorithms--that are really sort of OSS in that they were developed while the Google meisters were Stanford students (the algorithms are not really OSS of course because Stanford patented them but they were developed in the OSS model).

So I guess it depends on what Lanier's other scienfitic pursuits are trying to accomplish. As planned by those that fund the OSS movement, the OSS development model is all about commoditizing software functionality. Innovation is not the objective; shining up Unix was the objective in the 1990s as was improving the application server concept this decade. Now shining up the applications layer of the software stack is next. As long as you realize that OSS is doing exactly what is expected of it by the folks that fund it, criticism about innovation is unfounded.

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eWeek starts the year off with a little Microbashing built into a requiem for Netscape Navigator. The opinion piece alleges that the brower's death was a homicide instead of self-inflicted. It's just a sampling of how certain segments of the open source software (OSS) community make the entire community look bad. Or look so biased that the wider IT world won't pay attention to the benefits of OSS.

First you have to realize that in the world view of the journalist that wrote the eWeek article, based on other opinions he has posted, Microsoft, Ballmer and Gates are responsible for global warming, AIDS, the war in Iraq and the genocide in Darfur. Specifically, this particular analysis of Microsoft's involvement in the failure of Netscape as a business entity forgets some inconvenient truths (to coin a phrase).

In the mid 1990s, Apache and the NSCA at the University of Illinois--among others-were OSSing web server software and browser software respectively, perhaps even before Microsoft started bundling it. Netscape's business plan to charge money for functionality "users" could get for free, without adding any other value, was fundamentally flawed from the beginning. That Wall St. bought into the idea by giving Clark and Andreessen millions of dollars is not a sign that it was a good business plan.

Oh by the way, in the mid 1990s, the major "users" of web server software (the real business Netscape was in) were IBM and Oracle, not the corner grocer. They had to make a tough decision: pay Netscape or get it OSS. It wasn't a tough decision especially once Netscape decided to "add value" by competing with Lotus Notes, which IBM was acquiring around the same time.

But telling the whole story ruins the Microbashing. I am not saying Microsoft did not participate in some illegal "tying" and get caught just the way IBM and others have over the history of the IT industry. It just didn't have anything to do with Netscape's demise. By the way, Navigator's still effectively available OSS via Mozilla.

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New Year's week is always a good time to step back and reassess work objectives. (And your weight, addictions, prelidictions etc. if you so choose. I am sticking just to re-assessing my work.)

About half of my research relates to open source software (OSS). Most of the rest of my research involves investment-related research concerning the 10 largest software suppliers (see link to Research 2.0 to the right). Increasingly over this decade, those two subjects have converged.

While all the other year-end look backs and lookaheads scattered across the Internet are still taking a backward looking approach by talking about the "war between the OSS world and the commercial world," that is no longer a viable analogy. The closed vs. open war ended in 2007 (if not earlier) because in my opinion,
-- IBM tied or surpassed Red Hat in OSS-related revenue in 2007 (even as Red Hat grew 30%).
-- Microsoft decided all the hoopla over its OSS statements (e.g., "Linux is cancer") was a distraction and is now moving ahead aggressively with Samba, with its OSI-based licenses, and on many other OSS fronts (there is no one more religious than a convert).
-- Whereas in 2006, Oracle saw OSS as just a way to stick a finger in Red Hat's eye, in 2007, Oracle saw OSS for the tactical advantages and reduced R&D expense it provides (Oracle rolled out a virtualization product in weeks based on OSS)
-- Google built its infrastructure on OSS over 10 years; Google held Developers Days in June 2007 to get as much intellectual property going for its first generation applications products as possible with minimal cost to its investors
-- SAP is trailing in OSS related tactics but has made its database software OSS and will probably use OSS more aggressively as it brings NetWeaver out of its installed base.

Those five factoids pretty much make the convergence complete in my mind. They also raise questions about how to redirect my research framework and my biases in reaction. (NOTE: summaries of my OSS research show up on ebizQ.net, my broader IT investment research shows up on Research 2.0, and most of my opinionating begins at one of the two sites and then show up a lot of other places by means I only sort of understand).

First, here are the sources of my biases: I have been an information-technology (IT) market and product research analyst for a long time. Bull SA, Data General, the Datapro division of McGraw-Hill, and IDC before my current spot. I have consistently researched and analyzed the same topic at all of those places—What’s hot in IT now? What’s not and why?

Translate that list of companies above into market and product research topics and I’ve covered a good bit of the history of the IT industry: custom-built inventory control in the warehouse and accounting on the desktop 40 years ago; Multics, PARS, virtual memory management, minicomputing, microcomputing, and the Soul of a New Machine (the market for the machine not the book) during the 70s; material requirements planning (MRP), the first integrated office automation software and the industry’s first laptop in the 80s; the open-software movement, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), the debut of R/3 in the U.S., shared-memory high performance computing (not shared processor), and more in the 90s; application service provision, business process management (BPM), the enterprise service bus (ESB), and OSS so far this decade.

Because I have been talking about the convergence of OSS and all these other items for about five years, I see no reason to change my biases. I will continue to try to balance the opinion among
• culture subjects such as the acceptance of the GPL license or the Microsoft "live" philosophy
• development subjects such as Eclipse, the Linux Foundation, the efforts at TechED and Carnegie-Mellon
• Business subjects such as what IBM, Oracle, Google, SAP, Sun, CA and others—including Microsoft—are doing no matter what terms and conditions or development models they are using. I just need to add Alfresco, Compiere, MySQL, OpenBravo, Pentaho, Sugar, Talend and a few others to that list (I have already added Red Hat)

The research framework will change to include higher-order software beginning with ERP and CRM applications as well as all the emerging services that OSS will enable (people used to call them components). Because ebizQ readers are mostly users, I will look at things from your point of view here. Investors should look more at Research 2.0 but there will be many cross overs between the two I am sure.

But I am no longer an agnostic about the "religious" aspects of the OSS movement (I was never using that term quite right anyways). Software is not air or a tree or a fish. I have to stop pretending I am willing to be convinced otherwise.

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