Looking back on the Open Source year 2009 there are some clear trends and patterns that can be highlighted:

Governmental push and push back
We have seen US administration pushing Open Source in health care and we observed the Swiss government preferring Microsoft without even looking at (Open Source) alternatives.

Rise of new Open Source services players
Lucid Imagination has been formed around Lucene, Acquia continues to grow on the basis of Drupal. Thousands of new services players have been created around the world, some with, many without VC backing. Most of them are happy with their healthy pipelines despite the financial crisis and the recession.

Consolidation within Open Source has continued
Terracotta has acquired EHcache, SpringSource taken over multiple companies, many smaller niche technologies got eaten up. A lot of what is happening is not even transparent.

Commercial vendors have continued to acquire Open Source companies
There is a big appetite for Open Source in commercial companies, i.e. VMWare bought SpringSource, Oracle is taking over Sun (partially an Open Source vendor), to just name two well visible acquisitions.

The jury is still out on whether Open Source companies actually can make big money
Recent management changes, for example at SugarCRM, indicate that the climate is getting hotter even within the companies widely seen as successful. But outside of RedHat and a few companies that got cquired for good money, there’s still no proof that all that VC money will pay off. Which doesn’t mean that many of these companies are not making money. And, while the business case may not add up for the VCs, it certainly does for the Open Source user/buyer. According to most surveys they are happy with the cost savings and the won flexibility thanks to Open Source.

Open Source Business Applications continue to increase in importance
Pentaho just took the lead on EOS Directory, Open Source Business Intelligence is seen as a hot niche by Gartner, Open Source ECM and CRM are able to beat established commercial technologies. The number of reference cases is growing rapidly. But not just large enterprises are selecting Open Source, also the SME world is more and more convinced that Open Source is an alternative to established but often inflexible and expensive commercial offerings.

Linux has continued to increase its presence
Linux wins the consumer hearts through mobile phones and netbooks and continues to run on victory lane on the server side.

The battle on the client is won piece by piece
According to Statcounter Firefox 3.5 has a bigger market share than Internet Explorer 7. OpenOffice.org continues to grow, Chrome OS and Android are becoming real contenders together with Ubuntu to make endusers switch.

Open Source events are suffering from decreasing interest
Be it ApacheCon or many other Open Source focused conference, the interest of both the community as well as the enterprise buyer has decreased. This may have caused partially by lack of budget but mostly because of the growing experience and adoption of Open Source technologies.

Open Source projects continue to bring innovation to the IT landscape
Google presented Wave, Chrome OS, new ideas for better browsing rather come from Mozilla than Microsoft, Alfresco has been quicker in adopting CMIS than most commercial players, cross category integration is implemented faster within Open Source projects than outside.

Did we miss something? Don’t hesitate to add to the list!

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Matthew Aslett posted a great blog post, explaining the Open Source influence on data warehousing yesterday. Talking about PostgreSQL and Ingres as the basis of many commercial datawarehouses (examples Netezza, Greenplum) he also mentions the first core warehouse software published under an open source license by Infobright. A lot has been happening recently in this scene and the article is a must read for everyone looking for an affordable technology in this space.

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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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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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Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s newly buzz-making CEO thanks to the company’s $1B US acquisition of MySQL last month, gave the keynote at this week’s SugarCRM conference. In his keynote, as reported by InfoWorld, Schwartz identified a key reason why his company scooped up the widely-used open source database firm: distribution.

“What was attractive was how profound their distribution was,” Schwartz said. MySQL offers access to about 11 million deployments around the world, and Sun began to see MySQL delivering real value, innovation, and choice, he said. MySQL sells services and support for its database.

If you’ve been wondering about all those other open source acquisitions, wonder no more. The value is in the distros.

Paying less than $100 US for each deployment — make that ‘prospective paying customer who is already using the product’ — Sun has access to millions of potential customers for Sun services, other software products and hardware. That’s not a bad price for a solid customer lead in a business where the long-term value of any enterprise customer is measured in six or seven figures, and it ignores the very real value of MySQL’s current annual service and support revenue (estimated at $100M US) and harder-to-quantify value of its intellectual property.

So maybe we’ve got an algorithm for an open source project valuation. For example, Yahoo’s acquisition of Zimbra last September cost big Y $350M US. According to a Wall Street Journal story on Zimbra in November 2006, they had some four million users. Allowing for some shrinkage, that’s quite close to the $100 per deployment for MySQL.

But for all you FOSS project leaders out there who are running to check your download and registration numbers, keep in mind MySQL and Zimbra had “commercial” versions and paying customers prior to the big buyout. So don’t count on pocketing a Franklin for every download just yet. Still, a community can dream, can’t it?

Got some other ideas for valuing an open source project? Post your ideas and comments below.

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This sales and marketing automation tool launched updated on-demand hosted and download-and-run open source versions this week. While ComputerWorld says the company came out of “stealth” mode this week (so how did they get to version 3?), it’s been operating since Q2 2007 and is currently in the EOS Directory candidate queue. The tool, which combines web metrics, lead generation and management capabilities for enterprise users, is targeting open source firms as early adopters. More info:

• LoopFuse OneView 3.0 Announced (LoopFuse)
• JBoss alumni launch open-source startup (ComputerWorld)
• Can LoopFuse crack the open source conversion conundrum? (451 CAOS Theory)
• “Stealth mode” Loopfuse to be unveiled (Open Road)
• Open sourcing marketing: Loopfuse goes live (Open Sources 17 Apr 07)

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More than one person has moaned aloud at the thought of having to review — or worse yet, update — a Microsoft Project file. Sure, there are online and downloadable Project file viewers, and plenty of competitors in the project management application space. But most of them cost money, have limited features or are otherwise wonky in some way.

Until now. Welcome Projity’s OpenProj 1.0, a full-featured cross-platform open source project management application that reads/writes MS-Project .mpp, Project 2003 .XML and Projity’s own .pod files. This is no trial version or crippleware, it’s the real thing, and it comes in Linux, Unix, Mac (PPC/X86) and, yes, Windows versions. As others point out, this could be a welcome addition to the OpenOffice suite of enterprise open source productivity applications.

I have just started tinkering with OpenProj — the 1.0 version launched recently — and so far, I’m impressed. According to the OpenProj site, so are the top guns at places like Sourceforge, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Sabayon Linux and Novell.

Right now it’s an EOS Directory candidate, but we’re looking to rate it and add it to the directory. If you’ve got comments about OpenProj, add them below. I’ll keep checking to see if SteveB from Redmond posts a thumbs-down comment. Then we’ll know for sure it’s the real thing!

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Here are some of the open source-related headlines this week — so far:

• Sun shines on open source database MySQL — Sun Micro Acquires MySQL for $1B (Blogging Stocks)
• MySQL deal could stave off darkness at Sun — Buying MySQL Could Save Sun (Seeking Alpha)
• Oracle raises the app server ante for open source solutions — Oracle Acquires BEA for $8.5B (Blogging Stocks)
• Matt Asay thinks Oracle’s BEA bid is a win for JBoss/RedHat (CNet Open Road)
• Drupal offers security fixes — Drupal verion 4.7.x and 5.6 upgrades available (Drupal.org)
• Open source community opens source. Is this recursion? - Ohloh Goes Open Source (PR Newswire)

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Here are the most recent updates and additions to listed projects on the EOS Directory:

• eZ publish — Widely used and functionally rich content, e-commerce and document management system implemented in PHP.
• Amanda network backup and recovery — Amanda is the most popular open source backup and recovery software in the world. Amanda protects more that half a million of servers and desktops running various versions of Linux, UNIX, Mac OS-X and Microsoft Windows operating systems worldwide.
• Drupal Enterprise Content Management — Content Management System ( CMS ) implemented in PHP, with a strong focus on community, social networking, and media features. There’s a large repository of add-ons and extension modules available.

And here are the most recent candidate projects submitted:

• IX Workflow Framework — The Imixs Open Source Project (imixs.org) was created to promote the development of workflow technologies based on open software standards.
• GROUP-E – GROUP-E is collaboration software which integrates groupware, project management, and business server on one platform. The solution is based on a LAMP architecture (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). GROUP-E offers project management, transparent Samba (file server) integration, integration of Cyrus IMAP server with administration and personal SIEVE filters, support for SyncML 1.0, LDAP-based user management with single sign-on authentication, and LDAP contact databases.
• ZRM for MySQL backup — Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL simplifies the life of a Database Administrator who needs an easy-to-use yet flexible and robust backup and recovery solution for MySQL server.

Be sure to go in and offer your ratings and comments on new and existing projects. Plus — keep an eye out for the candidates. They’ll be published after they receive their EOS ratings from Optaros.

Got a project you think is enterprise-ready and not listed in the directory? Submit your project to the EOS Directory.

Got comments about the directory and the project listings? Feel free to add them below.

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