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Many times in the last year I have written about the Linux Foundation (LF) and last summer we caught up with Jim Zemlin, LF's executive director. In a wide ranging discussion at the time, Jim made the point that the open source software (OSS) movement has almost eliminated a big risk for independent software vendor (ISV) startups in the last few years: losing control of the code underlying whatever the ISV makes. He said he could not think of any Web 2.0 firm that wasn't safely on some OSS stack and therefore working with very low risk of losing the right to use its underlying software. Of course, OSS also lets the ISVs start with a very low cost of entry. Jim also mentioned that he had previously worked at the application service provider, Corio.

Application service provider 10 years ago meant roughly what software as a service (SaaS) means today. Jim's comments about ISVs made me think that he's probably on to one of the major aspects of OSS that we tend to forget. Open source software is also a major enabler of SaaS. As the application world goes SaaS, the eventual users have no strong opinion about the underlying infrastructure as long as service level agreements are met. This is a great boon to OSS suppliers because quality code will rise to the top, unrestrained by massive consumer marketing budgets and other marketing devices that often inhibit product acceptance.

This year we invited Amanda McPherson, the LF’s director of marketing and a popular open source blogger to pick up where Jim left off. Her feelings on the SaaS movement and other aspects of the Linux ecosystem are included in this podcast.

By the way, for the record, the LF is a nonprofit dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux. It is funded by Google, H-P, IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Intel and others and was formed in January 2007 by a merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group (not to be confused with the Free Software Foundation).

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In a March 2008 feature article here on the ebizQ site, a representative of GroundWork Open Source Inc. wrote about “Merging Open Source and Proprietary Systems Management.” Implicit in that subject is the merger of all the software being managed in some way shape or form. So we asked Thomas Stocking, GroundWork Co-Founder and Senior Technical Staff Member to join us to discuss how a commercial open source company like his works with other open source software (OSS) projects and companies, including Red Hat, Nagios and Ganglia.

Thomas has more than 15 years of development and technical experience in many aspects of IT infrastructure management. Prior to GroundWork he served as Director of Information Security at SiteROCK, a managed service provider (MSP) in the Network Operations services space. Previous to SiteROCK he was founder and CEO of InSync Communications, founded with the goal of building a better IT services contracting platform.

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In an August 2007 guest editorial feature article here on the ebizQ site Dominic Sartorio, President of the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), explained the challenge of interoperability in the IT industry. I certainly can’t argue against interoperability because it is the underpinning of my mantra, “open choice.”

ebizQ actually goes further back with the Alliance, having first met with its representatives back in February 2007, at its founding. I think the OSA is critical to the growth of the open source software movement because, presuming open source develops like every other IT market has developed over time, applications will be the key. If the OSA didn’t exist, the open source movement would have to create it.

With the first anniversary of OSA just past, it makes sense to catch up with Dominic and find out how things are going and what is planned for the rest of 2008 and into 2009.

In addition to his Presidency at the Open Solutions Alliance, Dominic is Senior Director, Product Management at SpikeSource. Previously he was in product management at Wily Technology and BEA Systems.

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In a recent guest editorial posted on ebizQ, the Apache Software Foundation gave its annual report. As you probably know, the Foundation is the formal organization put together in the late 1990s following the success of its initial open source software effort, the Apache HTTP server.

But looking ahead is probably just as important so we asked to talk to the ASF leader and this year it’s Jim Jagielski, an A-S-F founder and committer to “the” Apache server, as well as Apache Portable Runtime and Apache Tomcat. Jagielski has also contributed to Sendmail, xntpd, BIND, PHP, Perl and FreeBSD, among other projects.

We have met Jim before in his Covalent/Springsource role. For more about Covalent's open source middleware offerings see our ESB and integration server articles on the features page of ebizQ.net

For this podcast of about five minutes we’ve asked him to put on his A-S-F hat.

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In a recent blog I introduced Exist Global and its chairman Winston Damarillo. The news was that he was combining Exist Global, a software engineering services firm headquartered in the Philippines, with DevZuz, a developer of delivery platforms that link enterprise businesses to application development projects and processes. There were open source connections all over the merger.

But Winston is really 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 open-source-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 (see recent blog on Iona's Larry Alston) respectively.

In other words, if you are interested in making a business out of open source software (OSS) terms and conditions and its development model, Winston is a guy you need to hear.

Today in this podcast of about 5 minutes in length we hear from Winston Damarillo about the business of open source and the importance of community in building that business.

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In a recent blog post here on ebizQ, I talked about how OpenLogic is among those driving the inevitable consolidation of the open source software (OSS) development model but with a strategy that preserves the OSS culture. As a researcher in OSS, part of that cultural change means making the research more open source, which is why you find many things here on ebizQ at no cost (but still copyright protected of course) that major research firms I have worked for charge large fees for.

Now OpenLogic has taken the lead in an idea that furthers such open-source research into OSS, facilitating an OSS census. The first phase of the program involves the release of OpenLogic's OSS Discovery software under an OSS license, as well as an invitation for open source developers, software vendors and large ISVs to join The Open Source Census project. The overarching goal of The Open Source Census is to paint an accurate portrait of OSS usage in the enterprise.

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

Today in this podcast of about 5 minutes in length we have Kim Weins, Marketing VP at OpenLogic, to tell us more about what I hope becomes known as the OpenLogic OSS Census.

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In a recent podcast, I talk about some of the similarities of the informtation technology industry and the manufacturing industry with Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Inititiave (OSI). In particular, the idea was how the tool and die industry is a leading indicator of the health of the overall discrete manufacturing sector.

In this podcast, we take that thought to the next logical step. Let's talk to the guys that make the tools for open source software. So in the above downloadable file, we spend 5 minutes with Mike Milinkovich, representing the leading developer of OSS tools, the Eclipse Foundation. We wanted Mike's vision for the Foundation for 2008 and beyond.

The Eclipse Platform was released by IBM into Open Source in 2001. By the end of 2003, that group had grown to over 80 members and in February 2004 the group organized into a not-for-profit corporation. All technology and source code provided to and developed by this community is made available royalty-free via the Eclipse Public License. Major developer and user companies have all joined.

Mike....

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In a recent podcast, I talk about some of the formative thinking underlying the modern-era open source software (OSS) culture. I mentioned the “Cathedral and the Bazaar” writings and my analogy that software development in the OSS era would either become the “Software Factory of the Future” or be like a cottage industry. I mean that in a nice way; I literally work from a cottage.

Some one that gives cosmic thinking to those sorts of OSS analogies is Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Inititiave (OSI). In this podcast we spend 5 minutes with Michael and his vision for OSI. The OSI is best known as the keeper of the flame when it comes to studying and approving licenses as compliant with the most well accepted definition of OSS. The OSI has other roles in the movement as well.

Also if you want to follow the recent process by which the OSI approved certain Microsoft licenses as OSI compliant, see here, here, and here.

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October's Service Oriented Architecture in Action virtual tradeshow here on ebizQ.net, at which I spoke, got me to thinking. About how SOA and open source software (OSS) fit together. One thing is critical to the thinking; SOA requires thousands of services to be successful. It will take OSS to provide those thousands of services because the vendor community cannot possibly provide them all.

It’s cosmic thinking. Because It begs the question whether OSS will develop like the long promised software factory of the future or like the cottage industry it has been since it started. If I were Carl Sagan, this would be all kind of the spinning wheel vs. the cotton gin sort of stuff. But you don’t have to go back that far—or go that far afield from software development to get the picture. The OSS movement has tended to revolve around a white paper called the Cathedral vs. the Bazzaar, by Eric Raymond, one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative group.

This four to five minute podcast goes into more detail. In addition, we will shortly have a podcast featuring Michael Tiemann, current executive director of the Open Source Initiative and you can hear about some of the key issues Michael sees for the organization. Maybe we’ll ask him the question: software factory or cottage industry?

Also if you want to skip the cosmic thinking about SOA and OSS, I will shortly complete a feature article on some of the issues IT staffs need to consider when choosing whether to use OSS in SOA. And the presentation I gave at the SOA in Action conference on ebizQ is also available for replay at the URL noted above.

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A few weeks ago I talked with Mark Osofsky, VP of Marketing at OSS services supplier Optaros. As I do in all my “Talking to…” interviews, we talked about trends in the open source software (OSS) community and their effects on the IT market. I also invited Marc to participate in this week’s OSS podcast. Marc has a lot of good points about future trends in OSS. He intersects with my key mantra, “that OSS applications are the key to continued success for the movement.”

So let’s hear from Marc.

These four to five minutes go into more detail.

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Listen to or download the 3:32 min. podcast below:

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This podcast talks about Sun's business strategy relative to expanding its agreement with Microsoft. The PR came out on September 12 but the real motivation was explained by Sun on September 5... without even mentioning Microsoft. The OSS conspiracy buffs will have field day with this announcement. But it's just business.

These three-four minutes go into more detail.

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Listen to or download the 5:57 min. podcast below:

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This podcast tells you how we have designed our coverage of open source software (OSS) here on ebizQ.net along with the philosophy behind that coverage. That is, we look at OSS as a culture, as a development model and as a business. They all interrelate and in fact they are what make the subject area so interesting.

These six minutes go into more detail.

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