A new open source advocacy group is about to launch with a focus on
applications rather than open source standards, internetnews.com has learned.
The new group could well prove to be the missing link between standards
and application interoperability that the open source market has been
missing.
The group, to be announced next week at the Open Solutions Summit in New York City, will likely include key open source application vendors CentricCRM, Adaptive Planning, SpikeSource, EnterpriseDB, Hypernic, OpenBravo and JasperSoft, according to an e-mail to internetnews.com. CentricCRM, EnterpriseDB, SpikeSource, and JasperSoft declined comment.
The announcement of a new open source group ahead of an open source
conference is not new. In 2005, ahead of LinuxWorld San Francisco, Debian GNU/Linux distribution banded together in an effort originally called the Debian Common Core Alliance. That effort has since fallen apart.
In 2006, open source management vendors banded together to form the Open Management Consortium. Though the effort is ongoing, it has
made little noise in the past year.
The OSA is hoping to prosper because of its focus on integration,
interoperability and advocacy, as well as application solutions for businesses. One school of thought goes that it’s a niche that hasn’t been well served in the
past. Most open source groups have been focused on specific technology or
standards, while open source applications have been ignored.
For instance, the now-defunct Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) is being merged with the Free Standards Group (FSG) to form the Linux Foundation. They are all about Linux and standards, not applications, said the source, who added that OSA discussions did not begin because of OSDL’s collapse, but rather before the announcement of
the Linux Foundation, according to the source.
Although the group will be structured as a non-profit, it will charge membership dues, which are expected to be significantly less than the $1 million that the ill-fated OSDL charged.
