It has proven that foundations, such as the Eclipse, Mozilla or Apache Foundation, are quite good vehicles to develop, maintain and distribute Open Source projects. We might even wish that more of the popular Open Source projects, such as OpenOffice, MySQL or Scribus were supported and driven by foundations. If the foundation approach is good, why don’t we see groups of Enterprises create new ones to act in their joint interest? Why don’t we see an “Insurance Open Source Software Foundation” (proposal for the acronym could be IOSSOF) to develop frameworks and platforms for the typical needs of Insurance companies? While there are few of these conglomerates out there, very few of them are visible and popular. But think about if let’s say 50 Enterprise MS Office users would just spend 10% of their annual licenses cost to fund an organization developing all the right Enterprise features for OpenOffice. With the estimated 10 million USD a nice team of developers could be paid for and the rest of the money could be used for governance and marketing.

In many discussions with Enterprises people have expressed their interest in Open Source and the fact that they really like to use free (Open Source) software. But very few of them do actually contribute something back, be it work, code, bug reports, documentation or money. This is somewhat sad and impacts the Open Source eco system. Maybe Enterprises should see investments in Open Source foundations as a marketing and sponsoring expense and not take it out of the marketing budget. At the end there’s a positive signal when people read that insurance company XYZ supports the Mozilla Foundation, isn’t it?

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