While many Enterprises are not keen on using GPL software because of the viral nature of the license model, they don’t have any issue in using Apache software. The Apache license doesn’t commit them barely to anything. But that’s not the only reason, Enterprises do love Apache software. It’s also the quality and lastly the Governance model of the Apache community that makes their software so valuable for Enterprises.

A new set of videos with interviews with some of the key members of the foundation highlights why the Apache foundation has been so successful and effective.
Have a look at the interview with Doug Cutting (also below), Paul Fremantle, Rich Bowen, Ross Gardler and Jean-Frederic Clere see the leaders/founders/committers of projects such as the Apache Webserver, Tomcat, Hadoop, Lucene and others talk about what they think is important with Apache.

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One thing I like about WolframAlpha, the innovative “search” engine, is the comparison between companies. This morning I compared RedHat, IBM, Microsoft and Novell. While RedHat is still very small against IBM and Microsoft, it soon has a comparable size to Novell. If you look at the “revenue per employee” indicator RedHat beats both IBM and Novell! And the “P/E ratio” shows how much the investors believe in RedHat. The sad thing is that RedHat is still more or less the only well documented publicly traded open source success. Everybody else is at least hybrid or not yet traded. So, does this mean, Novell is just the exception or does it show what we can expect from other companies in the future? When will we see Alfresco, SugarCRM, SpringSource or any of the other open source companies going public? The financial crisis hasn’t helped in that sense and many “float” plan probably was delayed by at least a year. But if we don’t see it soon it may never happen.

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A “new” movie, called Code Rush, has been released that highlights the beginning of the Open Source age with the publication of the Netscape browser. Have a look at the video here.

Here’s the text from the website where it’s presented:

“Code Rush, produced in 2000 and broadcast on PBS, is an inside look at living and working in Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com era.  The film follows a group of Netscape engineers as they pursue at that time a revolutionary venture to save their company - giving away the software recipe for Netscape’s browser in exchange for integrating improvements created by outside software developers.  The copyright to the film is now available under CC vers. 3 for interested viewrs to download and use.  In the future the original footage from which this film was made will be accessible under the same terms.”

There are multiple places where the video is hosted, but not all work.

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Lately there have been quite a number of discussions around the objectives and definitions of the “Open Core” model. Aaron Fulkerson for example explained how Open Core helped him to improve his business model. Matthew Aslett clarified the definition of the model. Open Core described the strategy to keep the central elements of a product open (in the sense of Open Source) and sell additional components/features/elements commercially. Companies adopting this model are MindTouch, MySQL, JasperSoft and others . The definition is debated, but you get the point.
Now, why should an Enterprise care about this?
Here are the key advantages of the Open Core model taking an Enterprise perspective:

• The core of the product is completely Open Source and valuable because it’s the same that is used in the extended product. It’s therefore a good basis for a community to work on
• The core of the product is useful in itself and not castrated. For basic users it’s therefore a good product to work with
• Extensions are not Open Source but over time become typically part of the new core, so a continuous flow of new features can be expected also in the core.
• The product is architected for extensibility and integration typically and allows for other extensions (from the community) to be added.

So, communities should actually love this. And if communities love it, there’s a positive dynamic that is the basis of rapid extensions, code quality improvements and broad input for the requirement gathering. So the basis is set to have an active community gathered and this is good for the Enterprise. As it has been discussed before (link to blog - do enterprise actually care about open source), Enterprises more often than not, actually will buy the subscription for the bigger and commercial version of the product. So the licensing model of the core may not be an issue. But of course it is an issue for the community and the product owner. Communities love Apache, BSD and Mozilla licenses, product vendors prefer the more restrictive GPL approach that protects their commercial interest better. The Enterprise will not care as long as its interests are not restricted by the applied licenses.
So, for an Enterprise, the Open Core model may be better than other models if they help to produce larger communities, faster development/extensions and better quality. That’s what matters, besides low cost of product/technology ownership and flexibility in its use.

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I just looked at the 30 June 2009 statistics of SourceForge.

1. PostBooks ERP, accounting, CRM by xTuple
2. Openbravo ERP
3. Zenoss Core - Enterprise IT Monitoring
4. Notepad++
5. ADempiere ERP Business Suite
6. phpMyAdmin
7. 7-Zip
8. OrangeHRM - Human Resource Management
9. webERP web-based ERP  Accounting
10. FreeMind

Five of the top ten projects are ERP solutions (I see HRM as an element of ERP in this context). That’s quite surprising given how many people doubt on whether Open Source ERP is really option.

Some of these projects have been around for quite a while, i.e. OpenBravo ERP or ADempiere ERP (a fork of Compiere). They are also on EOS Directory, together with WebERP, OpenERP, SQL Ledger, Compiere and some others. Depending on what needs of a small to medium sized company, these solutions can clearly be seen as an alternative to proprietary solutions such as SAP, Microsoft/Navision or Oracle.

PostBooks ERP was new to me on this list. According to the description of SourceForge it is a free open source ERP, accounting, CRM package for small to midsized businesses. The client runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows (built with open source Qt framework). The business logic resides in PostgreSQL database. International ERP, accounting, and CRM tools. It has been registered with SourceForge in May 2007 (two years ago) and has been downloaded about 250′000 times since. Maybe it’s a coming star. I would be interested to know whether anybody from our readers and users has come across it.

But, long story short. ERP is one of the areas where Open Source is not yet really a peer of the best commercial alternatives, there’s still work to be done. Go for it!

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