I guess it should not have surprised me but it was difficult to log onto this seminar, about the Open Source Software (OSS) "security riddle" in the U.S. government, from a Windows PC.

The riddle, on which the title of the seminar is based, refers to the fact that a Federal Open Source Alliance (FOSA) survey, done in the second half of 2007, found that a third of respondents in the U.S. government thought OSS was very secure but another third was very concerned about its security (including some users that had already implemented OSS).

All of this information is great stuff for any user, U.S. government or not. And I believe it is available as a recording (Warning: probably an .ogg file) at the FOSA website.

Opening
Intel representative Nigel Ballard opened the seminar noting that Intel is one of the top five contributors to Linux. FOSA's original study found over 50% of U.S. federal government agencies are already using OSS. More than half of the respondents say it is or will be beneficial. The major benefit "in the beltway" is the ability to access advanced and multi-tiered security, according to 33% of the respondents. But another third said security was a challenge. This is what they call "the riddle." the title of the seminar

Nigel said everyone should use/write open source code to improve interoperability, one of the challenges U.S. Federal government users say they face.

A case study
A real-live OSS user, Casey Coleman, the CIO of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), said the GSA had been using OSS for about 7 years, "organically and at low risk." She said they implmented Linux, Apache, and a KM product at first but since 2005 have begun to use mission critical applications (but not transaction systems; I asked which type of mission-critical applications, if not transaction systems but received no response).

Ms. Coleman provided a great top 10 list of benefits/issues for enterprise IT users to consider

10. TCO-OSS does not mean free (as we have disussed here on this blog many times)
9. Avoiding product lock-in--this is the open choice benefit we have also discussed here often
8. Multiple support models--all the typical support is available and the good news is that vendors are competing on the quality of the service (rather than functionality I guess; so if you need "functionality foobar" and you get it closed or open, try open and let the suppliers compete on service)
7. Procurement--evaluation can be done much more easily without a typical Federal red tape (this same sort of red tape probably applies in many enterprises)
6. Agiliy-allignment with missione (e.g, the GSA now gets support for Linux but not for its KM tool, saving it money)
5. Transparency--OSS is standards based (I don't believe that is totally true but worth considering your enterprise's position on standards)
4. Collaboration--OSS users are not at mercy of the proprietary-code's vendor for improvements; and the user participates in or has insight into the process
3. Control over investments--
2. Open Source Moving up the stack--thanks for the plug; that's the name of my blog
1. Security

Security is a recurring theme of the seminar; it's "the riddle." As mentioned above, a third of survey respondents find OSS secure but a third of respondents are concerned with security issues (even U.S. govvernment OSS implementers cite security as a concern). The good news is that the Intel community, presumably with a major security concern, is a big user of OSS.

Information on Open Source Security
Red Hatter Chris Runge spoke to the fact that there has been an evolution of security biases, such that "in many places, Linux is the preferred platform of choice." For example, NSA came out to the OSS community with security-enhanced Linux for others to use. This is now built into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 (and presumalby other Lini, both the webinar was sponsored by Red Hat).

Independent of OSS, he poitned out that there were a lot of government mandates on standards that are hard to work with. Red Hat is working on things like the National Vulnerability database.

The Chicken-Egg Problem
Erik Lillestolen of HP wrapped up describing the chicken-egg situation. Should an agency solve the security problem first and then move to OSS or move to OSS first and solve the security problems with it. The answer is, like investing, it all depends on the agency's tolerance of risk. The same applies to any enterprise vis a vis any feature.

Erik also brought up the license differences in OSS. He suggested the agency have some kind of governance policty as well to control the introductuion of OSS into the environemnt. Also good advice for everyone.

Recommendations include identifiying internal or consulting experts. Erik said this is important because many things are different than what users would be accusomted to in proprietary code (I have not found this to be the case in my research so I am not sure what he is referring to; I asked in the Q&A part of the program but my question was not answered). Other recommendations were to manage alerts (keep good track of updates, patches, etc.) and start small (walk before you run).

Q and A session
Some of the questions and answers included:
Q. Who verifies the OSS? The agency using the OSS is responsible for security validation. I am a little rusty on U.S. "federal EDP rules" but I believe the point is that the vendor of proprietary code is responsible for certifying security.
Q. Different types of OSS? The hosts explained the differences between pure open source (e.g., off Sourceforge) vs. OSS from a company such as Red Hat.
Q. The US Census Bureau recntly had to back away from using hand held devices for the upcoming census. Were any open source components involved in the failed effort? The host were not aware of anything with respect to the handheld devices. Our involvement there has been at the datacenter level.

For more information on the FOSA, see my blog post on November 2, 2007.

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An article I saw recently on PC World caused me to change hats and become an interviewee, rather than interviewer. The article says:

“You may be intrigued by the idea of switching to Linux. But how will you get your job done without your favorite Windows programs?”

I am such a person. So I interviewed myself.

I do a lot of research about the open source movement from an investment research point of view (it’s been good for investors!) as well as from the culture/development model point of view here on ebizQ. For that reason I do use open source software (OSS) experimentally. But I do not use it day to day.

Perhaps I should cut the cord from my 20 years with DOS/Windows (of course I never had to "buy" either of them), and my 10-year Microsoft (MSFT) Word dependency. Before that my word processors were LotusWorks and WordPerfect. Ironically an employer that was a Mac shop "hooked me" on Word. And I should stop my short two-year use of Outlook. Before that, as with presentation and spreadsheet software, my email was whatever an employer or client told me to use. Primarily it was Data General CEO followed by IBM Lotus Notes but I have also used everything from CompuServe to Eudora to a great little package called TLC Express that came out of Mass Mutual Insurance (and that a client tried to market to other insurers).

The PC World article presumes you start by dumping Windows for Linux, but points out that many of the OSS applications its author suggests also run under Windows.

The article goes on to list some open source alternatives to Notepad, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Windows ability to burn CDs, Office, Outlook, Quicken (or Quickbooks), and instant messaging--and six other closed-source application products I don’t use. (So--although I am the interviewee--as a good market researcher, I have to tell you that the opinion that follows does not necessarily apply to a “market set” of users that deploys the applications I mention above plus Microsoft Publisher, BitTorrent, Skype, a digital video recorder, Photoshop, and a Windows disc partitioner. And, more important, the following research has an N=1. )

The PC World article is primarily based on the oft-stated premise that Office is “expensive.” This is one of the most prevalent arguments in favor of desktop open source but has never been backed up that I can find, at least within the research scope that the PC World article frames. The problem I find is that articles like this never define "expensive." I spend about $100/year for full-bore Office including Outlook, Quicken Home and Business edition, and TaxAct (which includes the fee for electronic filing).

The annual cost would be lower if I didn't upgrade every other year, or mailed in my tax forms. I update every other year for tax return preparation purposes but otherwise would not need to. The article does not mention tax return preparation at all but it might be one of the major uses of desktop PCs.

The tax return preparation angle also points out another factor in an individual's use of closed-source software. It is not the software I want, it’s the content. The latest tax laws. The grammar checker. The clip art library. And so forth.

But, OK, for the sake of discussion, I'm thinking of doing what the article suggests. Here's the first thing that hits me, a non-IT person, on the GnuCash web site:

"To install GnuCash on other platforms (other than Windows), users will need Gnome 2, guile, and slib. Neither the currently used swig nor the previously used g-wrap packages are needed anymore when compiling from tarball or when installing a binary."

Huh? I can't imagine what the message says that tells me how to first install Linux.

There are hundreds of millions of desktop Windows users. If the OSS comunity really believes they should become Linux/OSS users, they better start talking to some of them.

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I posted recently about the tendency of the open source software (OSS) blogosphere to take newspaper stories and analytical findings out of context... and then to really misinterpret them.

That recent post was about the many opinions on the web about the Australian government banning OSS and the U.S. Navy mandating it, neither of which was true. This week's nominee for most mixed-up open source message concerns a Gartner "finding" that OSS will take over the world on July 22, 2011 (exaggeration for effect!).

My first reaction to all of the breathless comments by others in the blogosphere about the future of the OSS movement was "I think I heard this before." And the reason was because Mark Driver of Gartner said basically the same thing right here on ebizQ on August 9, 2007. You can still listen to Mark's webinar at this link.

For a movement with source in its name, no one in open source seems to ever go back to the source. So, as I did with the claim that the "Navy just announced a bold IT policy," I went back to the source. Not surprising, Mark Driver was one of the authors of the "findings." The "findings" appears to be more a promotional piece. It links off the Gartner home page and links in turn to three or four dozen Gartner subscription reports written by more than 50 Gartner analysts, which I assume contain the meat behind the analysis. I think it is some sort of summary of all Gartner's open source related research in 2007. You can download the piece as a .pdf but I recommend you look at it online; although tedious, each of the three or four dozen links contains a mini-abstract that contains many more interesting opinions about OSS in 2008.

What makes the blogosphere fun, of course, is that half the commentators argued with Gartner over its analysts' "findings." So here are my disagreements with Gartner but I agree with most of what its analysts say:
-- Gartner makes a distinction between open and closed source vendors; as explained in my January lookback report, I don't believe that distinciton applies any longer (Microsoft was the last holdout and it got religion during 2007)
-- Gartner feels TCO on Linux-based systems might pass other systems in the future. The underlying subscription report probably has more detail but I don't believe you can break a TCO analysis down simply by the operating system that underlies the solution set being analyzed.
---------------Linux is UNIX; its TCO is going to track the TCO of all other applications to which you typically apply UNIX
---------------Linux is not Windows, it's UNIX; don't use Linux where Windows will suffice
(I know Microsoft will argue with me that Windows can do anything UNIX can do but that's not true yet and may never be true.)
--Gartner claims that 90% of enterprises will use open source "in direct or embedded form" by 2012. It would depend on how Gartner measures it but I would guess the number is either already north of 90% or that it might approach 50% by about 2020. It all depends where the AS/400 base moves and, if it moves to Wintel, how much open source Microsoft puts in its products. It also depends on whether you mean "free as in air" open source (called free software by the religous) or simply open source that is open source because of a business tactic.

Here's how I read the Gartner report:
1. Open source is not faster, cheaper, of higher quality, of different functionality, and so forth than any other software you might use. Software is software (and SaaS is not software but a delivery model for software).
2. Open source is a development model and a set of terms and conditions, some of which put limitations on your software's use that you might find unfamiliar and too restrictive.

There is no doubt that the OSS development model, which lead to an increased amount of open source code (I don't think Gartner mentioned Apache anywhere?) starting in the mid 1990s, will continue for a decade or more. If you're concerned about license restrictions (they are not in all OSS licenses), read the fine print.

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Be careful: A lot of blog post headlines just don't get the underlying story straight. Don't blame the blogger necessarily because headlines often get changed as posts are syndicated through the Web. I don't know which is worse for the open source software (OSS) community, the occasional bad headline or the frequent process by which info gets changed as it is passed from blogger to blogger like the whisper game you played as a kid. This is a bigger problem than the rantings of independent bloggers because a higher degree of accuracy is expected of professional organizations.

There's this one with the headline "Open source barred from Australian government" that says open source is out down under. Then there's this one with the headline, "US Navy's new policy: Only open software" that says the U.S. Navy has a new policy where it will use OSS only.

Neither headline is accurate.

I am going to assume the Australian story is correct and that the headline is simply wrong. The story seems pretty straightforward. It says Australian government CIOs have a problem with software that isn't commercially supported; I hear the same thing all the time from non-government CIOs. For example, at this week's Linux/OSS on Wall St. Conference, Aaron Groves of Citigroup--speaking on a Linux Comes of Age panel--said his group doesn't use software that is not commercially supported. Whether it is open source or not is not even a question they ask.

The CNet story is a great example of the tinkers-to-evers-to-chance nature of the blogosphere. The initial Federal Computer Week article was reprinted verbatim by another blog but without the context of the FCW site. The FCW headline writer had already turned the actual words in the speech, "open technology," into "open systems" and that was then picked up by CNet, where the headline was changed from "open systems" to "open software."

Then a claim was made out of whole cloth that the "Navy just announced a bold IT policy." Well in fact there is an almost two-year-old policy all about open architecture, which I interpret to mean standards--not OSS--from reading all the background material. Of course, the Navy is not against open source anymore than any Aussie CIOs are. But in fact the U.S. Navy CIO had to put out a memo in 2007 saying that it was alright to acquire OSS, not that every one in the Navy had to acquire it.

It's time for the OSS-oriented software businesses to stop claiming special privilege and acting as if supported OSS is any different than any other supported software. All software is acquired and paid for the same way it always has been in governments around the world.

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Early in March I posted about hearing the founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, speak in Boston as part of an adjunct to the AiiM Show called DrupalCon. Part of that Drupal event was the first public explanation of the strategy behind Dries’ new venture called Acquia. Acquia is a commercial company to service and support Drupal as the popular open source social publishing platform tries to move to the next level in the market. For comparison, Acquia is Red Hat to Drupal’s Fedora, except the commercial/non-commerical organizations were set up in the opposite order.

So after the show I caught up with Jeff Whatcott, whom I had last met when he was running Flex and related product marketing at Macromedia (before it was bought by Adobe but after Macromedia bought Allaire). When he became part of Adobe, he picked up responsibility for a lot of LiveCycle products as well. A January 2008 press release says Jeff is Acquia’s VP of Marketing; the Acquia web site says he’s “Communicator in Chief.” Other executive titles at Acquia in addition to Communicator in Chief include code gardener, head Zymurgist—not a clue?—and propellerhead. So we’re still not talking the change of IBM guys from blue suits and wing tips to blue blazers and Gucci loafers here.

And maybe my Red Hat analogy doesn’t quite hold water. Although Acquia is a for-profit company, the founder (Acquia’s Benevolent Dictator naturally) wants it done “in a responsible OSS” way.

Jeff illustrates a lot of what I have been saying about the almost now complete amalgamation of open source movement into mainstream software development and marketing. Or is it vice versa? Although one does not immediately think of Adobe as an open source company, at Adobe Jeff was very involved in open sourcing first the Flex SDK and later Flex itself.

As Jeff sees it, based on his three-month involvement with Acquia at this point, the real strength of Drupal is the number of addons and extensions and the ease of their integration into a Drupal instance. There are over 1800 add-ons already with everything from a shopping cart, a tie-in to Google analytics, and so forth. Each is PhP code that manipulates the core framework and that Drupal developers package into a directory, zip up into a manifest, and post. Other users simply reverse the process and install into their Drupal directory. From an open source software (OSS) community perspective, every add-on is its only little OSS project.

One thing that Acquia will do as a commericial venture is market Carbon, a package of the core and most popular modules as a supported distro. Of course Acquia will also provide the Drupal community much needed infrastructure and similar support as well.

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This Infoworld report on Red Hat CEO Whitehurst's speech on March 25 is potentially provocative to the say the least. The speech as reflected in InfoWorld illustrates that Whitehurst does not yet show much understanding of Red Hat's own industry, the software industry, which is not unexpected because Whitehurst just joined the industry from the air transportation industry a few months ago.

As I see it (based on a few paragraphs in the Infoworld story):
-- Hopefully Whitehurst was misquoted. But if not, the statement that U.S. unpopularity around the world (presumably referring to political issues related to the Iraq war, I guess) is good for open source just plain does not compute. One thing I have like about the software industry--and the IT industry as a whole--is that it has been multinational since the 1970s. If you deliver the goods, you get the order whether you work in Belarus or Boise. This guy apparently isn't going to settle for a shot from Steve Ballmer or Larry Ellison; he's hoping Rush Limbaugh will come after him.
-- Non-U.S. "people are resentful of sending billions of dollars back to the U.S." Take that, IBM, Oracle and many other leading open source proponents who get a large percentage of their revenue outside the U.S. (although most likely they are not repatriating it too quickly). This is probably good news for Microsoft. I am not sure exactly how Microsoft cash flows (vs. reported revenues) move geographically but I would guess that the big chunk of it that pays for the copies of Office and Windows OEM'd onto PCs made offshore and sold offshore doesn't come "back" from anywhere; it most likely just moves EFT from Red Rock to Redmond.
-- Red Hat's business model, to the extent he means its revenue model of subscription maintenance fees and professional services revenue is basically no different than IBM's or Oracle's (except that the others get a little more revenue upfront). Why should those nasty 'furriners' be more willing to send "dollars back" to RTP than Armonk or Redwood Shores?
-- Chinese and Russians don't want to pay an "intellectual property tax" to U.S. companies. Is Whitehurst condoning piracy?
-- "The dollars in open source relative to what we (Red Hat, I think) do are relatively small," he reportedly said. Well it's about 20% of the total, if conventional wisdom market size numbers are accurate. That's the same percentage that Microsoft represents of the overall software market.

Yahoo Finance reported, also under Infoworld reporter Paul Krill's byline, that others at the same conference feel that pending economic woes are good for open source.

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If you follow my IT investment research blog (see the IT Investment Research button to the right and look for a March 17 post on Open Standards in Massachusetts), you see why it is important to compare what the blogosphere says to what the official record says. That's the case for any subject... or as your father probably told you: "Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers." Ever since the open source software (OSS) blogosphere erupted about 10 days ago over the "new EU strategy document on open source," I have been trying to get the document itself to match its commentary to the official record.

Turns out I can't. I can't get the strategy document, at least officially, and presumably none of the others blogging on the subject can either. Dale Kidd of the Spokesperson's Service of the European Commission (EC) in Brussels says by email:

"The full strategy document with associated work plan has not been published, since it's for internal use only. However, the synopsis of the Commission's OSS strategy provided on the Europa site is quite clear and comprehensive."

The "synopsis" I was pointed to by Dale is revealing. It's really less about adopting open source in the EC and more about coordinating the adoption of open source between possibly competing EC agencies. The movement to EC adoption of OSS is eight-year-old old news. But it is new news, according to the synopsis, that the Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT) "has taken over the responsibility for the IDABC programme." IDABC stands for Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens.

(As I said last week, I can't figure out the euracracy. Europeans probably cannot figure out the U.S.'s multi-layered, bi-cameral, separation of powers governments either. As explained over on my investment-research website, the misunderstanding of the Massachusetts state government is what lead to so many people who follow OSS thinking of Massachuetts as an early-adopter haven of Microbashers. Actually the opposite is true: when a Microbasher civil servant threatened to take their powerpoints away from them a few years ago, Massachusetts government employees screamed like hell. It helped that the Microbasher bureacrat was also tyring to put into place a policy that cut off the legally blind, hearing impaired and others that depend on Word add-ins for the disabled. The civil servant obviously wasn't a politiican. He was also quickly retunred to the "dreaded private sector," as we like to call it here in Massachusetts.)

Anyways, the key items of this EU new policy are said to be
(1).) use OSS where a clear benefit can be expected;
(2.) consider OSS solutions the same way as proprietary ones in IT procurements (on a "value for money" basis--consider not only licence costs ,but also setup, maintenance, support and training costs);
(3.) promote the use of products that support open, well-documented standards (interoperability is a critical issue for the Commission) and
(4.) and for all new development, where deployment and usage is foreseen by parties outside of the Commission infrastructure, Open Source Software will be the preferred development and deployment platform. (The phrase in bold appears to apply to other government entities in Europe that might use EU developed software. And this ties into the recent EU request to have its own Open Source Initiative OSS license.)

II is unclear to me how that differs from the old policy, also described in the synopsis, which was to "formally allow and encourage" the use of Open Source Software where "a clear benefit can be expected". And I wonder how this correlates with the EC's recent contract with Sun where UNIX was specced in. Can new software be deployed to the new Sun servers?

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I must admit I cannot figure out the European Union bureacracy (euracracy) well enough to nail down all the details but clearly the EU, via its Competition Commission, adminstrative organization, funded projects, parliament and other arms is doing everything it can to legislate open source software (OSS) market success. The EU Competition Commission goes the farthest along this path, attempting to make its anti-competition findings apply worldwide. According to Bloomberg on March 6, adminstrators have come up with a new strategy document outlining how the euracracy will move to OSS (but I have yet to actually find the document anywhere).

The latest example comes from Patrice-E. Schmitz, who is the Director of EU Management Consulting for Unisys based in Belguim and represents a group called the R4eGov (Research for eGovernment) project. The project is funded by the EU and wants to have its European Union Public License (EUPL) approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) license-approval group. OSI is the same group that approved two Microsoft licenses as "open source compliant" last September, letting Microsoft into the club for the first time and thereby taking a lot of grief from the pure OSS community members.

A major issue that the OSI license-approval group has been working on recently is cutting down on the number of OSS licenses. There are dozens including the popular Apache, Berkeley and GPL licenses, many of which differ only in small ways only a lawyer can love. (Speaking of which, don't miss Larry Rosen's article in the features section of eqizQ explaining some of these issues and providing his OSL 3.0 license, which includes all the legal aspects of the GPL without the philosophical baggage.) It will be interesting to see if the OSI applies its growing concerns about too many OSS licenses to such an OSS benefactor as the EU.

As another sidelight, the commission, with about 32,000 employees, mainly in Brussels, recently made a large commitment to Sun but the products it bought were only open source in the weakest sense of the words. On January 31, Sun (JAVA) announced it has been awarded the Framework Contract to supply servers conforming to version 3 of the Single UNIX OS Specification (including their options, extensions, and associated services). Sun’s UNIX product called Solaris was made open source only in the last few years and only after Sun failed to sell it the usual way in the marketplace. And some in the OSS blogosphere question Sun's true commitment to open sourcing Solaris.

In the euracracy, does the hand droite know what the hand gauche is doing?

(For anyone who noticed that this originally said "hand rive vs hand gauche," I never had any French training. The sum total of my knowledge of French is from driving around comparing street signs to what I knew the thing to be. In 1968 I drove around Montreal for a day asking my wife why every St. Lawrence River crossing was called the "Pont Bridge." The rive mistake comes from driving around Paris trying to decide if I was on the Rive Gauche or the Rive Droite. So now I know, its droite that means right, not rive.)

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Attention all open source software (OSS) projects and organizations: I am researching the next in a series of OSS-related application research articles for ebizQ.

This month we are looking for open-source software and projects specific to an industry such as manufacturing/distribution, financial services (banking, insurance, and securities) or other services industries, government or education.

Information on both infrastructure software (e.g., messaging middleware, connectors, data integration, and so forth) and applications (e.g., a bill of materials processor) will be included.

The article is tentatively scheduled for release in mid-April 2008. It will be similar to recent ebizQ reports on open source business process management software and ERP open source software (OSS) applications (ebizQ Gold Club membership required but there is no charge to join). Your company’s product(s) may be mentioned based on my secondary research but if you would like to formally participate, please download and return the attached 1-page survey form by Friday March 21, 2008 to dennis@ebizq.net.

Download file

If you do not offer industry-specific software but have a partner that uses your OSS product to support specific industries, pass this on (and let me know your partner’s company name). The partner can be a systems integrator or other type of services provider. Industry-specific open source software delivered as a service (SaaS) will also be covered.

OSS service providers--let me know what you are doing as well although the survey form might not be approrpiate. Just describe your activity in an email to dennis@ebizQ.net.

Note that as the survey indicates, software products will be covered in the report if they use OSS (e.g., bundle in an OSS application server product such as Geronimo) even if they are not “sold” as OSS themselves and no matter how they are monetized.

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I met with Todd Barr March 5 to congratulate him on his new position at the Austin-based Ruby/Ruby on Rails-based venture called FiveRuns and to see if he’s nailed down any plans yet. Personally, being based in Austin is a coming home to Texas for Todd who worked for Dell Ventures Group before his six years at Red Hat.

Since he just joined FiveRuns in February I didn’t ask if the company name has something to do with a company softball game or… But whatever the linguistic background of its name, FiveRuns is a great example of a company making money (or more likely still planning to) on open source software (OSS). Unlike many OSS projects we cover, Ruby and Ruby on Rails are pure open source plays: Ruby providing a modern language (I dunno—a 6GL, I guess; remember I’m a deployment software guy not a development guy) and Rails providing a framework designed to run Ruby applications. The project came first (10 years ago for Ruby) and the need for service and product extensions followed.

Think Java vs. JEE (formerly J2EE). Just as Java and so forth need all kinds of other software around them to really get mission-critical attention in enterprise IT departments, Ruby and Rails needs applications beside and on top of it or else it’s just a useful academic exercise (think back to VA and Cygnus vis a vis Linux). Enter FiveRuns with a series of products and distributions to support the language and framework. Originally the company was a generic open source systems management offering (competing directly with HP, Tivoli, BMC, CA, Zenoss, Hyperic, and so forth) but realized that there was plenty of opportunity just with Ruby and friends.

Because its systems management software was originally generic, it was easy for FireRuns to tune the offering to Ruby and still have a good understanding of what was going on in the whole stack, from the networking to the database to the app server and up through the actual user applications.

If you are a Ruby developer or hoster, you probably already know these guys but if not, take a look. You have to look at the total ecosystem however and that’s where Todd comes in. He worked building the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) ecosystem at Red Hat and plans to do the same at FiveRuns. I have seen some blogosphere heat that FiveRuns is not itself open source but it meets my definition. It's new version is written in Ruby, uses Rails, distributes with BitRock and follows all their OSS-related license terms and conditions. Todd will work to eliminate any doubt that FiveRuns is a good citizen of the OSS community.

In the long run, FiveRuns doesn’t see itself so much competing with the generic systems management guys as being an extension that will better manage one specific set of (hopefully large in quantity) applications written in Ruby and running on the Rails framework. The Ruby ecosystem could very well become an OSS version of Progress (before all the acquisitions) or—pardon me guys—Visual Basic.

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Like New England weather, if you don't see what you expect, wait a minute.

When I was surveying for business process management (BPM) software with an open source software (OSS) development model and OSS Ts&Cs back in December 2007, efforts such as ActiveBPEL and Intalio that combined both were few and far between. Of course, Red Hat's jBPM and Sun's BPM efforts are also in the space as part of wider OSS efforts. The article that summarized my search for up and coming BPM players can be downloaded here by joining the ebizQ.net Gold Club.

General research said that BPM/EAI/integration software is among the most complex software developed and offered in the market. Therefore—conventional wisdom said—it is no place for the OSS culture and development model. Our findings disagreed and so apparently does a new entrant in the space, Colosa. Colosa announced February 25 that it was open sourcing its BPM package ProcessMaker.

In an email interview, CEO Brian Reale, CEO of Colosa, said he offers:
1.) an On Demand version which runs on their inhouse server cluster
2.) an OSS Version which can be downloaded for free and installed on Windows or Linux
3.) an Enterprise Version
The difference between the enterprise/On-Demand version and the OSS version is that the Enterprise Version comes with Support and some additional management features for Dashboards and Reporting.

Colosa, with South American roots and a U.S. office in Florida, is open sourcing its product according to Reale because it was built on the LAMP stack and users and partners were telling them that there are few BPM or Workflow tools available in PHP. (I have not had time to research that claim but if that's what partners were telling himI don't have to.)

Colosa is aiming its BPM/Workflow solution for the mid-sized company, and believes that OSS offers good distribution channel to reach the mid-sized company. Actually I have not seen that trend develop yet because OSS products typically require IT staff skills typically not found in the midmarket. But I expect that trend to develop and it does not hurt to be a little out ahead of the curve.

The real objective is to get Colosa's ProcessMaker workflow functionality into other ISVs products and you can't beat OSS for that purpose.

Colosa has been in business since October of 2000. However, initially it only produced specialized workflows for the Reinsurance Industry Vertical, according to Reale

So try it especially if you're an ISV looking for some workflow functionality. That's the advantage of OSS.

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I spoke with Mike Bates, CEO of HotWax Media, this week, following up on research I did recently on his IT-service-provider company and the entire open source ERP market. A summary of the research appears in a recent ebizQ article (off to the left of my head on the main Open Source page, depending on when you read this) titled “Can OSS ERP Projects Meet User Demand?”

The article asks the question: Are there any “market seams” that ERP open source software (OSS) can exploit? The issue is that all of the OSS ERP projects we researched are going to end up competing for IT budgets coveted not just by other OSS product and service providers but by Microsoft Business Division, Oracle, and SAP as well.

That is not as foolhardy an objective as it sounds. Mike Bates explained that he and his partners at HotWax are looking at local government and other industry-specific sectors underserved by the big-name ERP providers. HotWax already provides ERP services for a slew of the Internet-commerce companies on which it originally built its 10-year-old business. HotWax Media might not think of it this way but my research methodology says HotWax is already a leader in a major growing subsegment of the retail automation market, Internet Commerce, a sector underserved by everyone else (but Microsoft).

That’s what I call a “seam.” There are thousands of such seams to be found by slicing the market (as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP do) by industry, size of company targeted, number of employees in the company targeted, geography, and so forth.

Although HotWax started out building and maintaining web sites for users, it has morphed into an ERP services supplier via a major involvement in the Apache OfBIZ ERP project. HotWax counts both OFBiz project creators David Jones and Andrew Zeneski on its executive team, and also leads teams comprised of many of the OFBiz developers. It maintains no forge of its own but works totally through the Apache Software Foundation (see this recent report from Apache for more information).

By the way, showing my age, I had to have Mike explain that HotWax was a popular song when he was forming his company 10 years ago (by the group Beck). I looked at the lyrics and I am going to have take his word for it. They are no more cryptic than the classic line "I took my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry," part of the refrain from the ode that honors "the day the music died."

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Long ago and far away in the infancy of the Internet, research I was doing at the time for McGraw-Hill's Datapro led me to start using the mantra: “Functionality rules!” It probably was a play-on of a saying from some now forgotten TV ad or show. I am assuming that's the case becasue I’m pretty much lost when my boss or the PR department tells me to come with a short sound bite to explain my 100 worksheets of highly cross tabbed and carefully weighted statistics.

I had an interesting phonecon February 14 with Larry Alston, the VP and general manager of Open Source at IONA. I am always happy to find proof points, even non-statistical, that functionality still rules. Add Alston to a list of open-source-software (OSS)-oriented executives we’ve interviewed here (e.g., Roy Russo and Tom Elrod at LoopFuse, Yves de Montcheuil at Talend, John Newton at Alfresco, and more) that really have a clear understanding of OSS’s place in building a software business today. Functionality comes first; open source is a means to an end.

Larry Alston was clear to say that Iona was an “Infrastructure middleware company.” That Iona has products developed and marketed with OSS terms and conditions and other products developed and marketed via more traditional terms and conditions is simply a matter of reacting to user needs and wants.

I tried the question another way: “Is Iona a traditional company transitioning to be an open source company?” The answer: “No, Iona is an Infrastructure middleware company.” Functionality rules.

Larry has many other interesting opinions and observations about the open source development model and its terms and conditions from a marketing perspective. Like Yves of Talend, he brings a different perspective because of a software career that has spanned stints at Bachman Information Systems, C-bridge Internet Solutions, Object Design/eXcelon (acquired by Progress Software) and, before joining Iona in 2004, Pantero Corporation. We hope to have Larry on an upcoming podcast to hear more about OSS from a business perspective.

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Attention all open source collaboration/groupware/office-suite software projects and organizations: I am researching the next in a series of OSS-related application research articles for ebizQ.

Previous OSS application research has covered enterprise content management and business intelligence software.

My next application article, scheduled for March 2008 release, will focus on open source software (OSS) designed to promote group collaboration or productivity. Collaboration is one of the key themes for March on ebizQ as outlined in Elizabeth's editorial calendar. We think key issues to look at are document formats such as ODF and OOXML, and support for non-standard form factors such as mobile devices and appliances. If we're wrong, this is the time to tell us so. Another factor we're researching is the extent to which entire suites of collaboration software are available. Will the process by which spell checkers integrated into word processors and word processors integrated into other personal productivity tools like spreadsheets and personal productivity tools morphed into office/collaboration/groupware software repeat itself in the OSS world.

Open source collaboration software and services, including collaboration/groupware/office software as a service (SaaS) offerings based on OSS, will be covered. If your company or OSS community develops open source collaboration/groupware/office software and would like to formally participate in my data collection, please download and complete the 1-page survey form (see "Download File" below) and return to dennis@ebizq.net by Wednesday February 20, 2008

Download file

Note that as the survey indicates, software products will be covered in the report if they use OSS (e.g., bundle in an OSS application server product such as Geronimo) even if they are not “sold” as OSS themselves and no matter how they are monetized.

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The Microsoft (MSFT) acquisition of Yahoo (YHOO) doesn’t really have much of an open source software (OSS) angle.

But if you’re an information-technology (IT) analyst, you gotta say something besides “Wow,” right?

OK, how about this: Microsoft will now own Zimbra.

As our research here on ebizQ and at IT Investment Research (see link to right) has shown, Microsoft is moving to become a business and IT services provider rather than a technology provider. Therefore in the long term, the Office (and a lot of other things) giant from Redmond really doesn’t care if it’s using OSS or its own proprietary technology to deliver those services.

Zimbra might have died a slow death along with Yahoo if Yahoo had been left to wither by itself. Zimbra might become the next generation of Office with this acquisition.

Really thinking three unlikely steps ahead, this deal also illustrates one of the benefits of the OSS terms and conditions. Any Zimbra user worried about the effects of Zimbra being owned by Microsoft can fork the source on day one and go its own way.

And if he’s still with Zimbra, I also like the idea of Scott Dietzen linking up with Ray Ozzie. Transaction management meets peer to peer. That’s Dietzen of Camelot/Transarc/IBM (as owner of Transarc)/BEA heritage meeting up with Ozzie of Plato/Data General/VisiCalc/Symphony/Iris (as in Lotus Notes) heritage.

That would be a bigger merger than this little $44 billion thing.

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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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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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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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Bill Snyder has written a great series of stories over at Infoworld, covering the 10 most underreported information technology news stories of 2007. Hopefully it is not news to ebizQ readers but Bill, a very savvy experienced journalist, feels one of the ten is the fact that the mainstream media has missed the extent to which open source software (OSS) pureplays "have been steadily integrating parts of the hated commercial software subscription model into their business."

"Say it ain’t so, Linus," he comments.

As our research published over in the Open Source Features section shows in detail, we have a hard time even finding any pure plays outside of the Free Software Foundation (FSF)--which believes software programs are trees or fish or whatever. Red Hat's on the cusp and it remains to be seen which way it breaks in 2008. My bet is that under new day-to-day leadership, Red Hat breaks more commerical than free.

That is the debate of course: free vs. commercial, not OSS vs. commercial. As our ebizQ research also shows, OSS is not a business model but a set of terms and conditions and a development culture. Playing Bill's "underreported" game but just concentrating on OSS, here's my list for 2007:

-- IBM probably surpassed Red Hat as the largest provider of software under OSS terms and conditions as measured by revenue
-- Red Hat's intention to gain 50% worldwide server market share by 2015
-- The lack of acceptance of version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) by the Red Hats and MySQLs of the world (this is the key to Bill Snyder's story of course)
-- Red Hat taking on TIBCO and IBM in middleware with its MRG technology
-- Microsoft will probably have as many Linux boxes in its big "online" server farms as Longhorn systems; the new Microsoft question (also under new management) will be "what will it take to beat Google and IBM, not Linux"

As for Linus, Bill, of course he works for IBM, HP and Intel.

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Attention all open source software (OSS) ERP organizations: I am researching the next in a series of OSS-related application research articles for ebizQ.

Previous OSS application research has covered enterprise content management and business intelligence software.

My next application article, scheduled for February 2008 release, will focus on OSS ERP software and services, including ERP software as a service (SaaS) offerings based on OSS. The growth of OSS applications to the overall OSS movement is important because applications traditionally account for 60%-70% of software spend but just the opposite seems to be happening with OSS. According to IDC data released in May and discussed here, infratructure rather than applications seems to be dominating when it comes to OSS. But I think that is simply a matter of timing and tooling; the infrastructure has to be in place before the applications can follow. On the other hand, there is no one to one relationship between having OSS infrastructure and OSS applications so perhaps OSS will play out different than software markets have in the past. We are trying to determine that in this research series.

Or you might not even care and simply want to make sure you are investigating good solid OSS ERP packages for your company. In that case, the trends of ERP going back to the 1960s seem to be holding: it matters what industry you're in and how large or small your company is. Depending on answers to those questions, users are finding out that not all ERP software offers much RP.

And particular to OSS, can the enterprise truly “afford” to join the OSS ERP movement, giving back as much as it gets?

If your company or OSS community develops ERP software and would like to formally participate in my data collection, please download and complete the 1-page survey form (see "Download File" below) and return to dennis@ebizq.net by Friday January 18, 2008

Download file

Note that as the survey indicates, ERP software products will be covered in the report if they use OSS (e.g., bundle in an OSS application server product such as Geronimo) even if they are not “sold” as OSS themselves and no matter how they are monetized.

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A drumbeat of propaganda in the blogosphere says OSS pure plays are the place to be for technology users and investors. ebizQ research, the first of which appears on this site today, finds the trends run against that propaganda on the blogosphere.

The first research piece looks back at 2007. It finds that the most important trends in 2007 were that the OSS culture became more independent, the OSS development model sorted itself into three tracks (OSS-related software with restricted Ts&Cs, OSI-licensed software, and truly free as in air FSF-licensed software), and that the OSS services business grew deeper and wider. Oh, it also says there is no such think as an OSS market but you'll have to read the article to get the point.

Subsequent articles appearing in January will look at 2008 and beyond, and specifically list ebizQ's estimate of the leading OSS market players. Despite my opinion that there is no OSS market, no self-respecting year-end journalism can be released without a list.

The forthcoming research finds that one OSS pure play such as Red Hat may break out of its roots and take a place alongside the existing major software suppliers as a software market leader. But we found that it is the existing suppliers (that is, Adobe, BMC, Google, IBM, Oracle, SAP, TIBCO, and so forth) that will dominate OSS in 2008 and beyond. These suppliers will
• Provide the interoperability that OSA research says users are demanding
• Progressively move up the stack to provide applications functionality to match the operating infrastructure users have become accustomed to with GNU/Linux and saw in the midstack in 2007
• Monetize their OSS related offerings in such a way as to dominate the software market the way they always have.

IBM may in fact already realize more OSS-related revenue than Red Hat. And Microsoft will even join the movement. This is not a bad development for users because it means OSS performs functions users need, it works well, and it does not break down any more often than closed-source code. Our major finding is that that is all users really care about.

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In my IT investment research work (see link to the right), I am a big fan of the open source software (OSS) development model because it has restructured and lowered R&D expense for most of the leading software suppliers I cover, while making their customers happier. I enjoy opining about the OSS community and culture here on ebizQ because it reminds me of user groups like DECUS, NADGUG and others that were so important during the minicomputer era when the minicomputer companies basically supplied only what is called today “bare metal” (presumably because nothing is made out of “iron” anymore). And I am a fan of Red Hat because I like the underdog; it is the only one of a few small software suppliers we follow at Research 2.0.

That being said, Red Hat chairman Matthew Szulik on December 20 (in what might be his swansong as Red Hat CEO at a quarterly conference call because Red Hat also elected a new CEO on December 20) misrepresents the benefits of OSS. In doing so, I fear he threatens the leading software suppliers’ new cost structure, many OSS communities’ expectations, and maybe even the chance that Red Hat can become one of those leading software suppliers some day. He announced that Red Hat continued to grow at about a 30% trailing-12-month rate, meaning about twice as fast as software market leaders Microsoft and Oracle. He credits the company’s “strong financial performance” to the fact that Red Hat’s “business model actually requires us to deliver value in order for the company to be successful.”

I believe that is true. I just don’t believe the Red Hat's success has anything fundamentally to do with OSS. Szulik says “Open Source opens the opportunity to reduce the cost and delays associated with (big software projects because it involves) developing software in small, easily digestible increment...” That’s RAD 101 and not at all unique to OSS.

He goes onto say, “In Open Source software, innovation happens every day to produce a more highly reliable and higher quality product.” Our research produces no direct evidence that OSS-licensed code is more reliable than closed-source code. I believe that because OSS-licensed code is basically “newer” in design philosophy, that it is better built. But I can’t demonstrate that statistically. And because most OSS is also literally new I do not believe that it has been “exercised” enough yet to discover all the inevitable bugs. Software development using a RAD philosophy is more than ever a cottage industry, totally dependent on the old ladies at the spinning wheels not missing a beat or a thread.

Szulik says Red Hat “pioneered the subscription model… (which) has been a highly disruptive approach, not just in the delivery of the product and pricing, but in the fundamental approach of how the supply chain of computing software has been built.” There is no one-to-one relationship between OSS and the subscription business model. In fact it is just a variation of the systems rental and service bureau models that predated the minicomputer/independent-software-vendor (ISV) era, and the perpetual-license-plus-subscription-maintenance-fee model associated with most ISVs products today. Red Hat just executes it well.

Szulik talks about the joint collaboration with a customer that led to the MRG technology recently released to beta as an example of OSS. Ah, how about GE/BOA/MICR—1956? Or IBM, its Midwest utility customers and a Type II (sort of OSS but who would want the source) program called CICS—1968? And on and on.

So hats off to Red Hat for another good quarter and best wishes to Mr. Szulik in this new role as Chairman only. But let’s not credit OSS. And let’s not blame OSS when the inevitable bad quarter arrives for Red Hat, which the investment community might define as when Red Hat is growing only as fast as Microsoft and Oracle. OSS is basically about terms and conditions from a business perspective and a culture from a personal perspective. It’s not about higher customer loyalty than IBM or Oracle, more frequent conversions from free sample to paying customer, or better growth rates and profits.

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The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), which has contributed an ebizQ feature article here, sponsored a series of focus groups during 2007 with some interesting results. The focus groups, which the OSA called forums probably because they did not meet market-research criteria needed to provide statistically significant results, provided an opportunity for OSA customers in five different cities in North America and Europe to share best practices with others and for the OSA to learn what the most important issues are among open source software (OSS) customers going into 2008. More than 100 customers, including integrators and vendor partners, attended. All content has been published to the OSA community site and can he found here.

The findings, consistent with my own research, are overwhelmingly pro open-choice.

The OSA says it heard that commercial OSS solutions are being broadly adopted but that challenges—interoperability stands out as a key issue—remain. Consequently, the OSA plans to focus its efforts in 2008 on addressing the interoperability issues deemed most important by the forum attendees. Read that as “we’ve got to get along with Microsoft.” Over 50% said they needed to make an OSS solution run on Windows or integrate with other Microsoft products such as the Internet Information Services (IIS) web server, ActiveDirectory or Sharepoint.

In addition, consistent with our research, few customers value OSS because they can change the code to meet their requirements. Most instead preferred the code to meet their requirements as-is, so they could minimize support and development costs. We still believe the OSS terms and conditions related to the ability to change code are important to users if a community dissolves or a commercial sponsor stops providing support.

The OSA asked customers how important OSS definitions and Open Source Initiative (OSI)-compliant licenses were. Other than the advantage noted above, most said other elements of the definition were not part of their buying criteria. Vendors and integrators, however, were more likely to say this was important because of redistribution obligations.

Additionally, larger enterprises also consistently raised business process orchestration (BPO) and production management and monitoring as important issues. I am researching OSS BPO in December 2007 and will publish a synopsis of my research here in January 2008. Per our upcoming 2007 look-back/2008 look-ahead research, large enterprises recognize more value in OSS because they have more IT resources to manage support, maintenance and integration issues themselves. Many IT directors in larger enterprises simply say “go do it.” The path into the small and medium businesses, according to OSA, depends on ensuring that OSS products are already maintainable and interoperable out of the box.

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“Exchange” was the password for the day December 6, 2007 in the software industry and open source software (OSS) naturally plays a part.

SourceForge, the large OSS publishing house, said it would announce the opening of an exchange it calls an OSS marketplace. And Jitterbit announced an exchange that it calls its Trading Post, aimed more specifically at integration software. Of course Jitterbit hopes that means a lot of integration software optimized for its Jitterbit integration server engine, which is available OSS, but the company is not restricting the Trading Post to its products or by OSS terms and conditions.

Both efforts in a way are taking on Red Hat Exchange (RHX), which offers services and support for about 15 other well known OSS projects. SourceForge and Jitterbit want to go wider to address many smaller projects.

Jitterbit says its Trading Post is like a marketplace for partners, which include many systems integrators (Sis). In integration at least they have found that even if you offer the tool, domain expertise is as important. Its Trading Post is a place to share what it calls Jitterpacks (xml-based “integrations”), Jitter plug-ins (more like conventional adapters and connectors) and other integration techniques and access to integration services (not in the computer science sense of the word). In other words an SI might simply describe/demonstrate its ability to integrate particular types of software but not OSS the code and therefore require the user to subscribe to or contract with the SI. Others might put the code right out there in typical OSS fashion, more like the Sourceforge.net site that sits under the Sourceforge marketplace. Those that take that tack would more than likely be end users but it’s really matter of all comers. A selection of Jitterbit users, customers, and providers have already published their solutions on the marketplace including NASA, The State of Iowa, and Continental Airlines.

The Jitterbit Trading Post in particular is not a competitor with RHX because it is specific to integration. And as described in the RHX link above, Red Hat could stand to take Jitterbits' "all comers" approach and not limit itself to OSS products that run on top of Red Hat Linux. Jitterbit itself was launched in May 2006; we’ll have more say about it in an upcoming review of OSS integration server/business process management/enterprise application integration products as described here.

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Attention all open source software (OSS) enterprise application integration (EAI) and business process management (BPM) middleware organizations:

I am researching the next in a series of open-source-software (OSS)-related articles on applications and mid-stack software for ebizQ.

Previous reports have covered ESBs. application and web servers, and business intelligence software.

My next report will focus on OSS integration server and BPM software offerings, including software as a service (SaaS) offerings. Maybe you just call your project/product an integration server; that probably qualifies also since that is how most BPM and EAI middleware is built. If you want to discuss, drop me an email at dennis@ebizq.net.

The ebizQ article on OSS EAI and BPM middleware is tentatively scheduled for release on ebizQ.net in January 2008.

If you would like to formally participate in my data collection, please download and complete the 1-page survey form (see "Download File" below) and return to dennis@ebizq.net by Friday December 14.

Download file

Note that as the survey indicates, EAI and BPM middlewae software products will be covered in the report if they use OSS (e.g., bundle in an OSS application server product such as Geronimo)