Do people actually need something like EOS Directory? This is a question I ask myself from time to time when I look at all the work in front of and behind me. Well, even the most recent surveys reveal that identifying and selecting Open Source technologies is still a major challenge. And looking at something like SourceForge doesn’t make the job easier. Enterprise people are used to work with short lists, and this is exactly what EOS Directory tries to offer: a selection of enterprise ready Open Source technologies in a number of software categories. And as long as I meet so many people who tell me that they found the (Open Source) technology they were looking for thanks to an entry in EOS Directory, as long we will continue to update and improve it. There’s no real alternative and the things missing in EOS Directory can be amended (and will over the coming months).

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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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Looking at the popularity ranking on EOS Directory for the last 6 months (mid December 2008 to mid June 2009) you face quite an unexpected distribution. From the top 20 projects with the highest number of page views the majority are applications.

With Pentaho, a business intelligence suite, taking the lead the next four following are applications as well. First popular infrastructure project is the Apache web server, followed by two other more component like applications. MySQL, PostgreSQL and Tomcat are the only other infrastructure technologies in the top 20.  Content and document management solutions are the best ranked category with Alfresco, KnowledgeTree, Nuxeo, phpBB, Bricolage, Drupal and XOOPS on the list. There are a couple of other surprises also looking at the list. vTiger CRM is positioned in front of SugarCRM, ADempiere made it onto the list while Compiere didn’t, DIA is the only pure desktop tool.

While Pentaho seems to celebrate a strong lead and the top 20 attract 23% of the page views which is four times more than the average, it still has to be said that already rank 15 captures only slightly more than the average number of pageviews. Even the least popular project on EOS Directory was inspected at least 184 times over the last 6 months.

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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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SourceForge is acquiring Ohloh. Two of the largest and most prominent Open Source directories go together. That’s good and bad, as always. Ohloh has followed many innovative paths to generate interesting data and information around open source projects. They picked Ruby on Rails as their programming environment and probably were one of the show cases for Ruby with this. They had open APIs very early. I liked what they were doing a lot. SourceForge on the other side is sort of the father of all Open Source directories. They were very early and probably the most complete directory of them all. Bringing the two together could be an opportunity but also a bit of a threat, especially to Ohloh. Will they be able to continue to innovate? We will see.

For EOS Directory this recent acquisition doesn’t really mean a big change. While both SourceForge and Ohloh tried to cover pretty much the whole space of Open Source EOS is very focused on the most enterprise ready technologies and on the Enterprise user.

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After almost one and a half years of existence, it’s time to think about a redesign of EOS Directory.  Not only feels the current design a bit old fashioned, there are also a number of usability aspects to be corrected. And not all the functionalities and features were really  successful.

We would of course appreciate input and feedback when  going for the redesign. So if you have good ideas on how to make EOS Directory more effective for you, then please drop us an email to eos@optaros.com.

We already have some ideas. Looking at the analytics for example it seems that more than 76% of all the users are having a browser with at least 1280 pixels in the horizontal, no need therefore to focus on 1024. We have even seen quite a significant number of people with more than 3000 pixels! There are few people with iPhones and the likes, but if we can easily do it, we will prepare a specially rendered access for small devices.

The focus in the redesign will be put on a more useful directory section while we will also improve the content around what makes Open Source enterprise ready.  We certainly will simplify the forum section and try to make user input simpler. We plan to add a newsletter and a project specific alert function.  We would also like to integrate some external data (e.g. ohloh, sourceforge and the likes) if possible.

But again, if you have good and implementable ideas, don’t hesitate to send us an email.  Thanks for your contribution

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Over the last week EOS Directory has been updated by adding the most recent learnings from projects and research. Never before an Open Source Directory for Enterprise usage has been more relevant and needed! EOS is THE resource to help enterprises make more of their IT budgets during the expected downturn.

EOS Directory has been around now for quite some time, exactly 16 months actually. In the last 12 months, over  249′000  projects have been investigated on EOS directory and there’s quite a bit of anectodal evidence that people find EOS Directory valuable as a research resource.

Today EOS lists over 350 projects (up 52 since a year ago), for example 8 application servers, 30 frameworks, 11 programming languages, 7 rules engines, 17 systems management tools, 24 CRM/ERP/eCommerce solutions, 28 ECM solutions, 7 ETL toolsets, 4 search engines and 6 business process and workflow management platforms. The category application development and infrastructure seems with 151 projects and an average enterprise readiness rating of 2.4 to be the most mature, 31 infrastructure solutions with an average enterprise readiness of 2.0 and 98 business solutions with an enterprise readiness of 1.9 document that here’s room to catch up. Interestingly the “business solution” category seems to be the most interesting one for the visitors, with more than 1′300 project detail views per solution since the beginning of EOS Directory.

To add some statistics: During the last 12 months 64 new projects were added, 11 were removed (Celtix M2A, Centric CRM, ERP5, Ferret, jEDit, JFreeReport, Majordomo, OpenFTS, OpenRico, PostNuke, Xfire). 288 are still the same as 12 months before and 254 of these (88%) developed further (changed release number). 61 projects have a higher overall rating than before, 52 a lower one, 14 improved their “trend rating”, while 31 received a more negative trend rating than before. We list 19 4-Enterprise-Readiness-Stars, that’s 5% of all projects and includes Apache webserver, Tomcat, MySQL, Python, Java, PHP, Hibernate, Jboss AS, Spring, RedHat and Suse Linux, Firefox and jQuery.

So, let me end this message, saying THANK YOU to all who helped making EOS Directory a valuable resource and keeping it updated! And this includes both the consultants at Optaros, industry experts with valuable input and feedback, as well as the visitors and users of EOS Directory.

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EOS Directory sponsor Optaros has launched a completely re-designed site with lots of Web 2.0 capabilities to showcase their Next Generation Internet (NGI) expertise.

Check out:

• Multimedia case studies with audio/video screencasts — make sure you’ve got your ears turned on.
• Assembly methodology — no, they’re NOT all the same.
• Open source policies and partnerships — thanks to a number of open source partners, the EOS Directory is open to help you locate the right enterprise open source solution.
• Expertise galore — check out the Optaros blogging team on topics like Social Networking Inside Out and an inside look of the new Optaros site.

Jeff Potts at ecmarchitect.com also has some comments about the new Optaros site. As always, special thanks to Optaros for their support of the EOS Directory.

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We have extended our EOS Directory to provide an easy approach to Open Source projects to link into “their” page. This will allow Open Source projects to profit from being listed on EOS Directory and have real time ratings on their own site. All it takes is to copy some HTML code. Many projects have been asked for this functionality. There are a number of things we are also working on, so stay tuned for some significant changes coming up.

To use the badge, select your project page and look for the badge graphic and code at the bottom of the listing.

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We have been busy adding new functionalities to EOS. The latest addition is the “propose a project” feature. This now gives our users the possibility to propose candidates for the directory. Each proposed project will go through our standard process to receive the necessary information and the ratings. Our objective is to include projects that are relevant to enterprises and mature for enterprise usage. We try to keep the directory balanced in terms of granularity of the individual components. Currently we do have 294 projects listed and a significant number on the waiting list.

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