{"id":216,"date":"2007-02-19T12:25:33","date_gmt":"2007-02-19T20:25:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.formtek.com\/blog\/?p=216"},"modified":"2007-02-19T12:25:33","modified_gmt":"2007-02-19T20:25:33","slug":"open-source-going-strong-but-my-open-source-model-may-not-be-yours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formtek.com\/blog\/open-source-going-strong-but-my-open-source-model-may-not-be-yours\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Source: Going Strong, but my Open Source Model may not be Yours"},"content":{"rendered":"

New reports<\/a> from Evans Data<\/a> and The 451 Group<\/a> were issued last week\u00a0about the health of the Open Source<\/a> movement.\u00a0 The reports show that Open Source is gaining in commercial acceptance globally.\u00a0 Further, the reports find that software vendors with traditional licensing models are being increasingly pressured to reinvent their business models, and causing them not only to rethink how they license and distribute their software, but also causing them to realign their relationships\u00a0with their customers.<\/p>\n

Increasingly vendors are testing the waters by opening up some part of their software portfolios as Open Source.\u00a0 Microsoft has begun to experiment too,\u00a0even as they continue to spread FUD as with\u00a0comments<\/a> in the news today from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer where he says that Open Source trampels Intellectual Property rights.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Microsoft started some years back with the “Shared Source<\/a>” concept.\u00a0More recently, Microsoft has\u00a0set up a web site called Codeplex<\/a> to host Open Source projects based on Microsoft technologies.\u00a0 An interesting example<\/a> of the kinds of projects hosted on Codeplex is enterprise PLM software from a company called Aras<\/a>.\u00a0 Aras has transformed their proprietary licensing model for their Innovator product to Open Source.\u00a0 More recently Microsoft has also begun experimenting with an incubator project called OfficeLabs<\/a>\u00a0within their Dynamics ERP and Dynamics CRM groups that is chartered as true Open Source.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Evans Data study\u00a0found that, rather than services revenue,\u00a0more than half of the 31 vendors they surveyed said that their greatest revenue opportunity is in commerical licensing.\u00a0 It is quite common for vendors to offer Open Source Community editions that have limited forum-based support and to provide a commercial license for an enterprise supported version of their software.<\/p>\n

Some critics charge<\/a> that the original intent of the free share-and-share-alike philosophy of Open Source has been lost as more commercial entities are adopting some forms of the Open Source model.\u00a0 As an example, IBM has released strategic\u00a0Open Source initiatives like Eclipse<\/a>, OpenCloud<\/a>, and Unstructured Information Analysis and Search (UIMA<\/a>)\u00a0that have driven revenues to IBM in the forms of compatible for-fee middleware and services, and at the expense of their competitors.<\/p>\n

Another problem of Open Source often cited is that there are a flood of point Open Source solutions.\u00a0 Integrating all the pieces from Open Source together into more comprehensive enterprise business solutions can be a huge task, one that might lead you to reconsider the one-shop certified solutions coming out of Oracle, Microsoft or SAP.<\/p>\n

A new organization has been formed called the Open Solutions Alliance<\/a> (OSA) that seeks to remedy the interoperability\u00a0problem.\u00a0 The goal is to create something comparable to the big-vendor software suites\u00a0and that provides\u00a0consistent licensing and interoperability.\u00a0 Founding OSA members include EnterpriseDB, JasperSource, SpikeSource, and sourceforge.net.<\/p>\n

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New reports from Evans Data and The 451 Group were issued last week\u00a0about the health of the Open Source movement.\u00a0 The reports show that Open Source is gaining in commercial acceptance globally.\u00a0 Further, the reports find that software vendors with…<\/span><\/p>\n

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