The Redwood City, California-based services company has updated its SpikeSource Core Stack with the addition of support for Red Hat Inc’s Enterprise Linux 4 and Novell Inc’s SUSE Linux professional 9.2, as well as a number of other open source projects.
The PostgreSQL database, phpPgAdmin, pgsql JDBC driver, Xalan, and Xerces projects have been added to the 50-plus combined that can be combined into an open source stack that the company will provide support services for.
With the latest update to the SpikeSource Core Stack, the company is also offering developers the ability to create pre-configured stacks from the available components that SpikeSource will make and integrate to order, and then provide support services for.
As well as providing the pre-configured stack, SpikeSource will also provide a Network Installer to improve the efficiency of installing multiple components, as well as a Configuration Manager to ease updates and management.
Cutting out the complexity involved with building and supporting stacks of open source components is the name of the game for SpikeSource, as well as SourceLabs Inc, a rival open source services firm that also emerged last year. As well as component support and update services, both companies are also offering system and application testing services.
In order to make it easier for enterprises and developers to evaluate potential open source projects, the company has also giving its backing to the Business Readiness Rating (BRR), a proposed new standard system for scoring open source projects.
Designed to be a community project in its own right, BRR is being sponsored by the Carnegie Mellon West Center for Open Source Investigation, O’Reilly CodeZoo, SpikeSource, and Intel Corp.
The proposed system will enable developers and enterprise users to score projects based on a standard set of metrics, including: functionality, usability, quality, security, performance, scalability, architecture, support, documentation, adoption, community, and professionalism.
A white paper discussing BRR and the evaluation model is available along with some sample scores, at www.openbrr.org, while details are also being presented by the sponsors at this week’s O’Reilly Open Source Convention.
