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Open source culture and licensing practices were in flux in 2007, 2008 and
2009. The number of licenses that can be called open source proliferated, many
commercial open source-centric companies were acquired (some by other open source-centric
companies), and the four leading enterprise-software companies -- IBM, Microsoft,
Oracle and SAP (in alphabetical order) -- embraced the open source culture to
one degree or another.
The openness that has marked the information technology (IT) industry since
its founding has merged with the availability of a lot of code for study, experimentation
and improvement (to be accurate, a lot of code has been available in that way
since the beginning of the IT industry. But that did not have much significance
before 1990 because the code was tied to proprietary hardware designs).
The most important open source trend has been the continued movement of the
culture "up the stack," if one views software as a progression "up"
from types of software such as operating systems that rest on the "bare
metal" of a chip set, through middleware categories such as application
server and enterprise service bus (ESB), to applications software used by non-IT
professionals. However, as analysts of the business process management (BPM)
movement know, those that use the stack analogy do not agree on whether to place
BPM at the top or in the middle of this theoretical stack.
- To some, BPM is simply an extension of the middleware portion of the stack,
and of enterprise application integration software in particular.
- To others, BPM is at the top of the stack where it ties former-top-of-stack-type
software such as ERP, CRM, collaboration and others together.
In fact, BPM increasingly ties such business software together with consumer
capabilities such as social networking software and all types of C-side software
in the business-to-consumer (B2C) world.
BPM puts open source at top of stack
If you feel that BPM is at the top of the stack, then -- as of mid 2009 --
open source has crept all the way up. It is well established in multiple senses
of the word established.
- If an individual developer wants to join a BPM open source community, there
are multiple options.
- If an IT manager or CIO wants to deal with suppliers that offer both open-
and other license terms and conditions (Ts&Cs), this is increasingly the
norm.
- From a Ts&Cs point of view, multiple types of open source tooling related
to BPM are available. The latter is primarily important for software companies
that use open source in their own development efforts although their ultimate
products or services are not open sourced.
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