The last three months showed again a lot of user activity on EOS Directory. Many thousands of project pages views indicate what concerns and interests the EOS Directory users most. And the winner is … Pentaho with quite a significant lead! Pentaho made approximately 4.1% of all the project page views, followed by Alfresco that seems to be able to catch up with KnowledgeTree soon. vtiger CRM made forth over the last 3 months with significant lead to rival  SugarCRM that only came in 15th.

Sixteen projects of the top 25  are business applications, ECM the most dominant. This clearly supports the trend that Enterprises more and more consider Open Source business applications as components of their IT landscapes.

The top 25 represent roughly 26% of all the project page views, the top 4 10%. While there are clear leaders on the top the distribution after rank 25 is quite flat.

So compared to earlier rankings the changes are not substantial, but the interest in good open source business applications, namely in the ECM, BI and CRM/ERP segment, is still going to increase.

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As every year InfoWorld announced the winner of the Bossies, the “Best of Open Source Awards” 2009. Looking at the results there were few surprises, many of the winners were at the top already last years. Read the article in full detail here.

For our readers here two relevant “best lists”:

Best of Open Source Enterprise Software

• Compiere
• DimDim
• Drupal
• Intalio BPM
• Jaspersoft BI suite
• Magento
• OpenBravo
• Pentaho BI Suite
• Piwik
• SugarCRM
• Wordpress

Hall of Fame - top 10 Open Source technologies

1. Linux kernel
2. GNU utilities and compilers
3. Ubuntu
4. BSD (3x)
5. Samba
6. MySQL
7. Bind
8. SendMail
9. OpenSSH and OpenSSL
10. Apache (web server)

It’s good to see that all of the above technologies also are listed on EOS Directory. And looking into the details shows that there’s no real difference in opinion neither.

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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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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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After listening carefully to feedback from our user group we decided to change the rating procedure.  We are currently implementing a new approach that will be launched soon. In our next version users will have to authenticate themselves (and therefore register before if they haven’t done so yet - it’s the same procedure as for the forums)  before they can rate.  To complement the rating people will receive both a feedback on what the rating actually means and the possibility to enter a comment to support their rating. With this we hope to receive valuable additional insights into usage experience and more objective rating input. We are interested of course to receive feedback from the user community on whether they like this new approach or not of course. The changes should be online in a few days.

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When defining the categories and selecting the projects there was a hot and long debate on whether to include Programming Languages and how to compare and rate the individual projects. For example should a programming language be benchmarked against the generic needs and requirements you would list or against the usual domain the language is used in? PHP for example is mostly used for web applications, so should only this domain be looked at? Many people in the expert group voted for not including programming languages at all. Others including me claimed that programming languages are actually one of the most important categories in Open Source software over all and can’t be excluded. We finally decided to include them but there was still the discussion on how to compare them and to decide whether for example PHP is really higher in “enterprise readiness” than Perl for example. Well, after long discussions we finalized the ratings and are following the answer of our users with high interest. From a popularity point of view we seem to have made the right choices with the exception of Ruby that seems to be very popular with our users and even beats Java in popularity. From a user rating point of view Ruby and Perl are more positively rated by our users than what we proposed. But this is just the current assessment and gathered feedback at this point in time. We can expect many more debates and discussions over the coming months. Stay tuned!

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Only few days old, we have already received a lot of feedback from the EOS user community. We are happy that people are pleased with the site and find it quite usable. Aside of generic comments and feedbacks we also receive many proposals for projects and technologies to be added. We plan to implement a “propose project” functionality for this but for the time being eos@optaros.com is the easiest way to communicate missing projects. We have a fairly rigid process to check candidates and we have right now quite a long list of candidates to be added. Let me reiterate what it takes in our eyes to be included in the catalogue:

• The technology is “open source”
• The technology can be considered enterprise ready (see criteria), we don’t list products that do not achieve at least one star
• The technology fits into one of the categories we cover in EOS
• The technology clearly is well represented within enterprises across the world

We are aware that there are probably quite a number of projects out there that fit these threshold criterias and are not listed (yet). But, well, that’s the reason we brought it online. We want the input and feedback of the enterprise users out there on the web. Thank you for contributing!

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Not only did we launch our EOS at 10:02 CET today, we also experienced already significant peak loads and had to fix a couple of things to make the site faster. We apologize for any inconveniences! We already gathered quite a lot of feedback from our first day users and will make sure we can incorporate many of the ideas as soon as possible. With postings on Heise Online and Heise Open we attracted many interested people from Germany. Matt Asay blogged on EOS as well and we hope many more will cover it.

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