In a new report from the Linux Foundation a lot of data is published showing who actually helps to move forward the Linux Kernel. Interesting to see that the largest share (21.1%) of contributions comes from independents. Second largest contributor is RedHat (with 12%), followed by IBM (6.3%), Novell (6.1%), Intel (6.0%) and many others. What this report shows again is the important support of Open Source by large hardware and software companies. Many of these of course have vested interests, but that’s okay. Important is a well structured governance process that assures that the final deliverable actually fulfills the need of many and not of a few. The report is certainly a worthwile read.

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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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Recently we were approached by some of our users questioning our assessment/rating of MySQL versus PostgreSQL. Currently MySQL is rated with four stars for Enterprise Readiness, while PostgreSQL only shows three. All the other ratings (functionality, maturity, community, trend) are the same otherwise. This seems to be a good occasion to talk a bit about our rating criteria and the way we apply them. Also, we were having quite a bit of a debate in the newly formed EOS Advisory and Expert Board on this same topic, so it’s good to share some of the findings.

So, here’s how we describe the Enterprise Readiness rating on this site:
On the basis of the other criteria and additional experiences as well as further product characteristics (e.g. how easily a base technology be introduced can into the typical enterprise, how reactive the community is, how easily a product can be integrated in commonly-found enterprise IT environments, or how well does the product support open standards) the Enterprise Readiness Rating (aka “Optaros rating”)  indicator is consolidated. This rating describes how capable an open source product is to cope with the needs and requirements of midsize and large enterprises and organizations. The EOS Directory does not list products that do not at least meet the 1-star rating.

To go a bit more in detail there are a number of aspects that influence our assessment of Enterprise Readiness, beyond of what is coming from the other rating factors:

1. Popularity, market reach, distribution power, public awareness, typical ranking in top x lists:

   Clearly here MySQL seems to outperform PostgreSQL. If you google for example for the two technologies you will see that you have approx. 10 times more hits for MySQL than for PostgreSQL. Same effect when you look at Google Trend.

   Asking a typical enterprise architect what open source databases come to his mind, he usually will mention MySQL first. Even on EOS Directory MySQL is much more popular (number of page hits) than PostgreSQL.

2. Availability and quality of professional services and consulting:
   How easiy is it to find a training for MySQL versus PostgreSQL? How many potential partners can an Enterprise find to help with tuning, integration, support, etc.? Also here MySQL seems to be ahead of PostgreSQL. But with EnterpriseDB, Fujitsu, CommandPrompt,  2ndQuadrant, Cybertec and other firms, Enterprises should be able to find good help for PostgreSQL also. So, no real advantages of one against the other.
3. Adoption in the market (byEnterprises as well as SW vendors):
   MySQL has been very successful in partnering with all kinds of SW vendors (not only Open Source product companies). This results into a much higher adoption of MySQL in both the software vendors and consequently their end customer. Even on SourceForge MySQL is referenced by more than 7′000 other projects, while PostgreSQL is being mentioned by less than 1′000. Independently many Enterprises have established MySQL clearly as their second database standard (after Oracle or IBM), this is less often the case with PostgreSQL. So in terms of adoption MySQL takes the lead again.
4. Enterprise specific atribute, features, extensions and requirements:
   Here we look whether MySQL offers better/more migration tools for example, whether it’s easier to manage with the typical enterprise tools already in place, etc. MySQL may have a bit of an advantage here, but not by much.
5. Enterprise culture orientation:
   Is MySQL easier to buy for Enterprises than PostgreSQL? Does the support of Sun (and now Oracle) help to make it easier to evaluate and consume? Probably yes, but with the disadvantage of being less “open source”.

Now there’s a lot more to say about the two technologies of course. There are some known problems with MySQL that ask for workarounds, similar issues probably exist around PostgreSQL. There are open source projects that clearly recommend PostgreSQL over MySQL, e.g. Jackrabbit or Django. These things however should rather influence the “maturity” rating than the Enterprise Readiness. So if we keep the top rating for Maturity for both technologies we can’t make this a differencing factor in Enterprise Readiness. The same is true with other aspects such as the validity of the community or the availability of features.

There have been discussions in the EOS Advisory and Expert Board to automate more of the rating process and base it on available data. This may be well the way to go for the future, but in my eyes it’s exactly these discussions and real world experiences that make the EOS Enterprise Readiness rating so powerful.

Now, to come back to MySQL and PostgreSQL, should we downgrade MySQL to three stars, upgrade PostgreSQL to four stars or leave it as it is today? Stay tuned, we will make our decisions in the coming days
And anyway, both are good and widely used technologies. The difference isn’t big, but may be somewhat prestigious. Join the discussion!

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Content Management is a very popular category in the open source ecosystem. There are more than 2’000 open source technologies out there being capable to handle, manage and distribute content. So why would we need any of the 250 new ones published over the last six months?

Some of the existing 2′000+ solutions are quite well known. The list of the most popular and most widely used technologies includes Alfresco, Apache Lenya, DotNetNuke, Drupal, eZ publish, Joomla, MediaWiki, openCMS, Plone, Typo3, WordPress and XOOPS. They all have in common that they are being downloaded hundreds of times per day, have gathered substantial communities and exist since many years. You could say there’s no reason to look further. These offerings cover all what an enterprise might need in terms of content management, if one can’t do the job the other will.

So what’s the use for the other 2‘000+ solutions and frameworks? And why have open source communities and contributors added more than 250 additional open source content management technologies during the last 6 months? It will certainly not be easy for them to be successful in the already crowded market. They don’t differentiate very much on technology (more than 70% are based on PHP) and they follow common standards for licensing (more than 80% are GPL). They have been created by small and very small communities (more than 80% of the new open source cms have less than three contributors) and their biggest differentiator may be their creative names such as Bedita, MyCMS, Spiffy CMS, KnowWE, Meduse, Yanel, Luftguitar CMS or Utopia CMS. Naming creativity alone will though not make them a winner.

But what would we actually expect from new content management system? We want componentized platforms, modularized functionalities, adherence to open standard, sophisticated and easy-to-use inline editing, support for state of the art web technologies (such as Ajax, Flash, multi-media), automated syndication, marketing automation, widgets/x-idgets support and a service oriented access. And solutions should be configurable but still easy to handle and manage. That’s probably more than what small 1-2 person team can build in a few weeks. So does this mean we should stick with the top players again who aren’t fully able to cover these things neither? Maybe not, or at least not always.

What is nice in open source is that users can evaluate technologies and pick the one that supports their specific needs the best. In many cases this can be a fairly specialized application and often only a limited scope of functionalities is needed. New entrants have the opportunity to shine with advanced architecture concepts, lightweight implementation approaches and state of the art integration of the latest standards. So why not look again at some of the newer technologies? And who knows maybe in a couple of years KnowWE, Meduese, Yanel or any other of these new kids on the block will be found in enterprise application stacks as often as Alfresco or Drupal today.

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The creation of the Enterprise Open Source Directory (short: EOS Directory) in 2007 by Optaros has been triggered by a clear need of enterprises and organizations asking for help and advice to identify and select Open Source technologies. With roughly 250 Open Source platforms, solutions and frameworks listed and rated initially, EOS was able to establish itself as a source of reference in this space. Since then EOS Directory has continuously grown, listing more than 350 projects today and building up a vibrant community of visitors and input contributors. The EOS Directory Blog has become one of the key voices in the Open Source scene.

In early 2009 Optaros has handed over the EOS Directory platform to Bruno von Rotz, a well known Open Source specialist and consultant and the initial sponsor of the initiative. To strengthen the neutral approach to ratings and selection of the technologies, the new EOS Directory Advisory and Expert Board has been established over the last weeks. Initial members of the EOS Directory Advisory and Expert Board include Aleksander Farstad, Cédric Walter, David Nüscheler, Gianugo Rabellino, Roberto Galoppini, Hannes Gassert, Hans Waarle, Joel Gardet, Matt Asay, Matthias Geisler, Michael Hanisch, Olivier Pépin, Raju Bitter, Ralf Hauser, Seth Gottlieb, Stephen Walli and Tiberiu Fustos, representing user and provider communities as well as international expert audiences. The Advisory and Expert Board will be both instrumental in guiding the future development of the EOS Directory Platform as well as in making sure that the content is accurate, relevant and fairly represented.

During the next months the EOS Directory Platform will also be rejuvenated and updated to even better support Enterprises and Organizations in need for Open Source technologies’ selection and evaluation help.

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There has been a discussion for quite a while on whether there are good open source business solutions out there and to what extent these projects could replace proprietary software solutions. It clearly seems that it’s quite industry specific on whether you can find such sollutions or not. The telco industry made some efforts, but the most visible results clearly seem to come from the public sector, namely government solutions. In a recent announcement Blackduck highlights the value of open source technologies in the health care industry. Since Obama announced that he wants to push open source in this field, the interest is high of course. Blackduck estimates that the identified 800 health care open source projects represent a value of roughly USD 6 billion  or 31′000 staff years of work. That’s quite impressive. Even if not all of this is top class software and even if it doesn’t fit specific needs in a given country or context, this is a highly valuable knowledge and code base to start to work from.

In the past we haven’t included a lot of industry specific software in EOS Directory despite the fact that we ran across quite a number of very useful technologies. We may need to change that decision.

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EOS Directory is all about Enterprise ready Open Source software. And of course we have documented our criteria for the individual ratings on this site. But let’s take on step back and rethink what makes a project/software actually Enterprise ready. Of course different companies have different opinions but there’s quite a bit of consensus what is important:

• The software must be of high quality, reliable, scalable, etc. So all (most) of the traditional qualities must be fulfilled. That’s all about software engineering.
• There must be enough usage of the software to “guarantee” survival of the technology for the foreseeable time
• The software must be well documented, both in separate documents as well as in the code. There are companies who only use Open Source software, if there’s at least a book published on it
• There must be a vibrant community of a significant size behind the software. In some cases this community may be replaced by a company that would have to fulfill at least the minimum criteria in terms of size and financial viability. Here Enterprises are often forced to make compromises.
• The community (or company) governance is transparent and state-of-the-art methodologies, approaches and principles are applied when developing and maintaining the software. Many enterprises love the Apache Foundation for its strict set of rules here.
• There should be at least some market for professional support and integration services around the project. Ideally this market is where the Enterprise using the software is situated.
• The software is written in a programming language and using components and frameworks that are long term viable and ideally a standard in themselves. Many enterprises prefer Java based open source software and there are some where PHP is a no go.
• The license model applied is compatible with Enterprise usage and allows for enough freedom to not restrict the Enterprise in its development and business strategies.
• The functionality and features must be good enough to meet Enterprise standards. This includes security features, user experience and everything else you expect from software.

These criteria are representing quite a high bar and many Open Source project probably would fail in one area or the other. It’s though much easier to make a compromise when you can influence the roadmap or even the software itself. And here’s a true advantage of Open Source against proprietary software that by the way should meet most of the same critera and doesn’t in many cases.

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It’s a well known secret that (commercial) Open Source companies are quite small compared with their more traditional competitors. Company sizes of less than 100 people are common, some of the companies even don’t reach the twenties. And with this staff they need to do quite a lot, i.e. marketing, sales, support, strategy, and of course, product development. When looking at the core teams of even sizable software products it may astonish with how little manpower the development can be done. This is only partially because of Open Source. Yes, of course, it helps that you can use existing modules and frameworks and you don’t have to reinvent infrastructure type code. But what is even more important is the fact that many of these products and platforms developed are new, with little legacy and progress can be made quicker therefore. Modern software development environments are a further plus (i.e. continuous integration and testing) and the methodologies applied as well. What it comes down to is that two or three people together can come up with an impressive technology in few months and further progress after version 1.0 is staggering at least for some times. It’s only after a couple of releases when more traditional problems like the need for downward compatibility, migration paths, etc. start to influence development efficiency in a negative way. Many of the today leading Open Source technologies (be it CRM, CMS or BI and Systems Management solutions) have initially been developed by usually less than a handful people. And of course these small teams have had it much easier to coordinate things and agree on directions.

There is a downside to all of this too of course.  The dependency to the individual contributors is significant and often Open Source projects fall apart when a key member of the development team leaves (or forks the code). But thanks to the nature of Open Source it’s still possible to base new developments on the existing source code.

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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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RedHat has published an Open Source Activity Map to illustrate how different countries differentiate in the use and adoption of Open Source. This is quite an interesting tool to look at and when you compare the different countries you can see a number of tendencies:

The European countries are still taking the lead with France being the most active, Spain and Germany following. Most of the top 10 are European countries. To a certain extent suprising it position 6 for the UK.

The US, despite its size, is only reaching the 9th rank in terms of open source activity, China 15, India 23.

Looking at the raw data it’s however worth a discussion how representative the results are. Linux - makes sense taking the RedHat view - seems to be to a certain extent equalized with Open Source. What I really liked about the analysis is the nice mash up with Google Maps and the ability to get an overview quickly thanks to Ajax and graphical visualization.

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