Industry-specific open source still incubating (part II)
Editor's Note: If
you haven't already, be sure to read part I of this article to learn
about the state of industry-specific open source software.
Other Industries
In other industries, open source software such as the
Bostech’s ChainBuilder ESB (tied to the Sun-related OpenESB
project) is appearing in retail and healthcare product and projects.
Its message mapping adheres to industry-specific standards, such as
Healthcare HL7 and EDI H12, which makes it easy for other software
suppliers and service providers to pick up such a product for use.
Despite its cross-industry type name, the Eclipse Foundation OSEE
project mentioned above is related to big-ticket manufacturing such as
airframe manufacturing. OSEE is designed to provide a tightly
integrated environment that supports lean engineering, integrated
around a user-definable data model to provide bidirectional
traceability across the manufactured items’ full product
life-cycle.
For example, as I was writing this article, a story crossed the
Business Wire about United Airlines experiencing more than one runway
skidding accident recently and finding crossed-wires in its
airplanes’ braking systems. That lead to a
multi-million-dollar question revolving around whether the wires were
crossed in manufacture or in maintenance. Solutions such as the
Eclipse-based OSEE are designed to answer such questions, preferably
before an incident.
An industry forum has also been created to maintain and promote an
open source implementation of Service Availability software for
telecommunications. It takes the form of a high-availability middleware
specification. Founded by Emerson Network Power (ENP), Ericsson, HP,
Nokia Siemens Networks, and Sun Microsystems, the OpenSAF foundation
aims to standardize high-availability middleware for Linux-based
carrier-grade systems. The group plans to license its results under the
Lesser GNU General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1
In the ERP applications space, Compiere offers both distribution and
other-services industry ERP solutions along with its cross-industry ERP
offering (which can actually be considered a manufacturing application
for the reasons explained in my recent research into open source
ERP, an abstract of which is available here on ebizQ—no-cost/no-obligation
Gold Club membership required). In several cases, value-added resellers
have taken Compiere even further into other industries; examples
include Retail/Point of Sale (DATALP, http://217.128.65.245/) and
health care (Expert Sistemas, http://www.expert.com.mx ). Compiere uses
Java, Joss, Eclipse, Apache, and the Google Web Toolkit and of course
gives back to the community via the Compiere project itself.
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