The OSA is being launched at the Open Solutions Summit in New York by the likes of Adaptive Planning, Centric CRM, CollabNet, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, JasperSoft, Openbravo, SourceForge.net, SpikeSource, and Talend.
According to OSA spokesperson and Centric CRM chief marketing officer, Michael Harvey, there is a lot of interest from other parties, with GroundWork Open Source and Unisys also signing up ahead of the official launch. Microsoft has even heard of this and has speculated about whether they might join, he told Computer Business Review. It’s an interesting conversation that we’ll want to have.
Membership is certainly not limited to open source vendors, with Harvey insisting that any vendor that shares the aim of boosting open source application usage among businesses is welcome to join.
While that might not sound like Microsoft, the volume of open source applications that run on Windows, and the company’s willingness to partner with the likes of XenSource, JBoss and SugarCRM might not make it such a fanciful suggestion.
According to Harvey, one of the advantages of any company joining the OSA will be that they get to partner instantly with several open source application vendors, rather than having to pick them off one by one.
It encourages a broader vision and broader effort. By doing it formally it brings a structure and formality to the exercise, he said, noting that for the open source vendors there is also potentially strength in numbers. We do see a center of gravity around this effort that will have to be taken seriously.
The ‘center of gravity’ was a tagline much used by the Open Source Development Labs, which recently merged with the Free Standards Group to form the Linux Foundation. While there are other open source advocacy groups out there, Harvey insisted the OSA is different.
We are unique in the consortium line up because we are not focused on a specific technology, he said. There is certainly breadth in the membership roster, with Adaptive Planning offering business performance management software, Centric CRM customer relationship management software, and CollabNet software development tools.
Additionally EnterpriseDB is a database vendor, Hyperic systems management, JasperSoft business intelligence, Openbravo enterprise resource planning, SourceForge a repository of projects, SpikeSource a variety of stacks, and Talend data management software.
According to Harvey, the common thread that links all the members together is targeting business users. This is bout lowering barriers to adoption and making it easier for business users to use this software. It’s higher up the stack; we’re focusing at the deployed solutions level.
Describing how the OSA will work in practice, Harvey said that members will not seek to set standards but to focus on practical ways of achieving interoperability. High up on the wish-list are single sign-on, common license management and shared customer account records.
This will be achieved formally by working groups focused on interoperability, community and marketing, while the consortium will also focus on creating a community of communities so that individual open source developers can informally find common collaborative goals.
Harvey said the OSA is an independent non-profit organization in which each member has a single vote. It will be run by an elected board, which is likely to come together in March or April, once any further interested parties have had a chance to join.
There is certainly space for the organization to grow. Notable absentees include infrastructure platform vendors such as Red Hat, Novell, and the other Linux distributors, database vendor MySQL, and application vendors such as SugarCRM and Alfresco.
