Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

A Lesson From Open Source: Make Time To Collaborate

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Earlier this week I was listening to the Drupalcon keynote “State of Drupal” presentation given by Dries Buytaert, project lead for the popular open source content management system. I wanted to hear Dries discuss any interesting new capabilities (Drupal providing the basis of WCM “distributions,” kind of like Linux distributions, is intriguing to think about) as well as project metrics (3,000 Drupalcon attendees, 6,700 add-on projects, some other big numbers). However, to me, neither of these were the most interesting parts of the presentation.

At one point in the presentation Dries said the following:

“The key message is, as we grow we need to stick to our core values and core culture…It's a culture of sharing and collaboration and it is absolutely key to everything that we do.”

He said this while showing the slide below:

Open source projects can be great examples of successful collaboration. Although it sounds simple, expecting your people to make time to collaborate (and to put it on their schedules), I think, is a big deal. Many executives have outlined, in some form, the same challenges (we are growing, stick to our culture, collaborate). However, I suspect far fewer of them took it the step further and told their people to put collaboration on their schedules.

When was the last time you reserved time on your calendar to collaborate? Outside of meetings (where someone else reserved time on your calendar) have your ever reserved time to collaborate?

A Tale of Two Community-Derived Open Source WCMs

Blogger: Larry Cannell

This past week I had conversations with both Acquia and DotNetNuke about their open source web content management (WCM) solutions. Acquia is a commercial entity, launched in Q4 2008, to support the open source WCM system Drupal. DotNetNuke Corporation is a commercial entity supporting the open source WCM system DotNetNuke (DNN), and launched its first commercial product in February 2009. There are some surprising similarities between the two projects and companies, but also some subtle (yet distinct) differences as well.

Both Drupal and DotNetNuke (DNN) provide the foundation for vibrant open source ecosystems, which were established years before their commercial entities were funded (the first release of Drupal appeared in 2001, DNN in 2003). Each community has over 700,000 members and boasts over half a million known Internet websites running their software. In addition, these companies have a surprising number of customers for the short time they have been in business; each has in the neighborhood of 450-500 companies who are paying for their WCM product.

Both of these products are well architected and extensible. As a result, each community has thousands of add-ons available that enable new features or change the appearance of the product. Both can be used to quickly build websites leveraging advanced Internet services and providing cutting-edge capabilities.

However, there are some distinct differences between the two. The type of open source license they employ has influenced many of these differences.

DNN is licensed under the permissive MIT open source license. This license places almost no restrictions on how source code can be reused or relicensed. Of the thousands of DNN extensions and themes available, some are also licensed as open source. However, many are commercially licensed and must be purchased. This makes for an active ecosystem of system integrators selling commercial DNN add-ons. To facilitate this, DotNetNuke has an online marketplace, Snowcovered.com, that provides a convenient catalog of available DNN extensions. DotNetNuke also sells prepackaged versions of DNN as well as developer and support services.

Drupal is licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL). This license restricts how the software can be reused or combined with other products (this CCS Blog post describes the GPL in more detail), limiting the proprietary software opportunities for system integrators. Nonetheless, this has not stopped the Drupal community from thriving and building businesses based on the product. Acquia, for example, provides various levels of support packages, a hosting service, advanced search services (based on Solr), professional services, and is beta testing DrupalGardens.com (Dries Buytaert, Drupal’s project founder, describes it as ‘Drupal as a Service’).

These are not the only open source WCM systems on the market. Nevertheless, I thought the outright similarities and the subtle differences were worthy of some discussion. I am also not saying these are the only types of WCM businesses that can be supported by a permissive open source license (like the MIT license) or a hereditary license (like the GPL). However, it shows that an open source license can significantly influence how vendors leverage their communities’ resources.

Social Media, Search, and Open Source

Blogger: Larry Cannell

For those of you attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week, there is a small change in plans for the open source search panel scheduled for Wednesday afternoon. The original title “Is Enterprise Search Ripe for Open Source Disruption?” is still relevant but it is no longer a panel discussion/debate between commercial and open source vendors (like it was in Boston).

Instead, Brian Pinkerton, Chief Architect at Lucid Imagination, and I will be talking about social media, open source, and search. Some of the things you will learn are:

• Why you should pay attention to open source search
• Enterprise opportunities
• The short list of technologies
• How search is essential to successful social media sites
• How popular social media sites are using open source products Lucene and Solr. A kind of behind-the-scenes look at these sites.

The session is scheduled for 3:15pm, Wednesday, in Room 124. See you there!

Zimbra For Sale?

Blogger: Bill Pray

Rumor has it that Yahoo! is shopping Zimbra, an open-source e-mail and collaboration solution that Yahoo! acquired in 2007. Yahoo!’s failure to capitalize on the promising technology from Zimbra has been fodder for bloggers, but what is more interesting is what could potentially become of Zimbra. Who might buy Zimbra from Yahoo! and why? In looking at the current enterprise e-mail market, here are some thoughts:

• Adobe – With Adobe code on nearly every desktop and Adobe’s push to achieve the same ubiquity on mobile devices, it is interesting to watch Adobe dive into the collaboration SaaS market with Acrobat.com (leveraging its web conferencing success). However, Adobe is still missing some pieces, including e-mail. Acquiring Zimbra would help Adobe flesh out their SaaS collaboration offering, and give it a stronger on-premise story to complement Acrobat Connect Pro (Adobe’s enterprise web conferencing solution).
• Cisco – A year ago Cisco acquired Zimbra’s cousin – PostPath – but has yet to launch its offering. Buying Zimbra would not get Cisco much more than it has with PostPath, other than some additional customers. However, it is interesting to note that the PostPath solution uses some Zimbra open source code. I wonder if Cisco would have bought Zimbra over PostPath if it had the option a year ago?
• Google – As Google continues its push into enterprise communication and collaboration markets, buying Zimbra could give Google an enterprise class solution that adds an on-premise story - something Gmail currently lacks. Besides, this makes for a great story because Yahoo! bought Zimbra with the intent to take on Google.
• IBM – While it is doubtful IBM is interested, Zimbra could be an beneficial acquisition for IBM. With Zimbra’s open-source underpinnings and code that is not hampered by more than a decade of development as a proprietary, on-premise solution (Lotus Notes), IBM could do what Yahoo! failed to do – turn Zimbra into a robust, enterprise-class, SaaS solution. Currently, IBM is on the same painful path as Microsoft in trying to turn its mature, on-premise e-mail solution into a SaaS solution also.
• Microsoft – While Microsoft was once interested in acquiring Yahoo!, it wasn’t because of Zimbra. Microsoft has nothing to gain by buying Zimbra. Zimbra would not really provide Microsoft with anything that it doesn’t already have in some form – except to put Microsoft in the awkward position of owning an open source based e-mail solution that was designed from the beginning to compete with Exchange. Even acquiring Zimbra for the customer base is not that interesting for Microsoft because most of the Zimbra customers are somewhat anti-Microsoft. Microsoft would just lose them to another solution eventually. Besides, Microsoft has its hands full trying to launch Exchange 2010 as both an on-premise and SaaS solution.
• Novell – Similar to IBM in that Novell has it’s own decade plus old solution with GroupWise - but different in that Novell currently does not have a SaaS offering for e-mail. A bit of Novell history for you – Novell was one of the first major vendors to offer a consumer and enterprise class, web-based e-mail solution with NetMail. Novell chose not to pursue the SaaS e-mail market and sold the solution to a partner. If Novell wanted to get back in, it could buy Zimbra and spin up its own SaaS solution in an e-mail market where they have previously done well as the alternative to Microsoft and IBM.
• Oracle – Interestingly enough, Oracle Beehive currently leverages the Zimbra open source code for it’s web client. Zimbra could beef up Oracle’s e-mail solution in Beehive (as well as some of the other collaborative pieces) and equip Oracle to become more serious about Beehive On Demand, its SaaS offering. 

Is Bluenog’s Use of Open Source Sustainable?

Blogger: Larry Cannell

There have been some recent interesting posts discussing Bluenog, a company which sells the Bluenog ICE (integrated collaborative environment). This is a product consisting of a portal framework, content management system, a report generator, a wiki, and a calendar all working within a secured environment using a granular permission model and is capable of integrating with enterprise single sign-on systems. The system looks to be very Enterprise 2.0-ish and may provide a useful intranet environment that brings together the breadth of information needed by knowledge workers. I had a chance to look at the product at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference and talk with the company in an extended briefing. The product should get the attention of many IT managers.

While the Bluenog ICE product itself looks interesting, it is the business model the company uses to develop it that is causing a controversy and, in my opinion, raises some flags. Bluenog advertises itself as an open source company (or, rather, that is what most people walk away thinking when they have seen or read about the company). To be precise, here is what Bluenog says about their use of open source:

Bluenog ICE leverages several open source CMS, open source collaboration, open source portal and open source BI projects. These projects provide the building blocks for Bluenog ICE and allow us to provide tightly integrated solutions at a fraction of the cost of traditional alternatives.

The web page linked above lists a total of 19 open source projects as being used within the Bluenog product so, clearly, Bluenog is a consumer open source software. However, although the distinction may be subtle, the way Bluenog uses open source is different than what most enterprise IT managers may be expecting.

First, let’s be clear, Bluenog sells a proprietary product. Bluenog does not make the resulting source code of their commercial product available via an open source license. Paying customers get a copy of the source code but this offers none of the benefits, such as transparency and choice, that enterprises can gain from leveraging open source. What can you do with a copy of the source code? Open source becomes powerful when it is out in a community, gaining new features, getting security flaws fixed, etc.

Second, the only company that has benefited from Bluenog’s approach to open source is Bluenog itself, not its customers. But the sustainability of that benefit is questionable. Let me explain.

A number of the open source products used, which provide core ICE features, require significant changes to work in the Bluenog framework and these changes are not contributed to any sort of open source community. In essence, major parts of Bluenog are built from forks of open source products that are folded into their proprietary framework. Any enhancements or security patches from the originating open source community would have to be manually integrated into Bluenog because they are now separate products. For example, Bluenog is built with a version of the Hippo CMS that is one major version behind the main project.

So the question enterprises should be asking is this: Is Bluenog’s development model sustainable? Arguably, other companies have used open source this way. For example, IBM’s Lotus Symphony is based off an old version of Open Office. However, Bluenog is different for two reasons. First, Bluenog isn’t IBM. They are a startup and have limited resources. Second, they are creating a whole new integrated product based off of the amalgamation of several open source products, which sounds like a big integration challenge. IBM is re-basing the next release of Lotus Symphony on Open Office 3. Can Bluenog say the same about Hippo CMS? Do they care about future versions of Hippo CMS or are they content with keeping the older code, essentially turning these pieces into their own proprietary code?

If I were an enterprise IT manager considering Bluenog I wouldn’t let their use of open source sway me at all and evaluate them as a proprietary software vendor. I would also start asking questions about how they plan on sustaining the development of the product. Bluenog’s approach to using open source may have helped initially to get the first product out the door faster. However, the enterprise software market is a marathon not a sprint.

Open Source Search

Blogger: Larry Cannell

A few months ago I asked readers of this blog: “Is Enterprise Search Ripe for Open Source Disruption?” This marked the start of my interest in the intersection of these two intriguing topics: open source and search.

Since then Burton Group published a report I authored entitled “Open Source Search: Bringing Enterprise Search Out into the Open.” Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraphs:

‘It has been over ten years since “open source” was first used to describe what was previously called “free software.” Early detractors of open source software pointed to potential risks and claimed only commercial vendors could produce high quality software. However, leading open source development communities quietly moved forward with a sometimes slow, but disciplined, progression of releases to the point at which the quality and robustness of these offerings is no longer easily questioned or challenged.

‘While popular open source projects like the Linux operating system, the Apache Web Server, and the MySQL database were capturing headlines, open source projects that tackle the problem of searching large quantities of content (e.g., Apache Lucene, which provides a high-quality Java search library) have become the basis for search capabilities provided by thousands of Internet sites and many software products. Like popular open source products that have come before, open source search is finding its way into enterprise computing environments by first earning its stripes through successful implementations on the Internet—an ultra-competitive environment where a search-based user experience can be the difference between success and failure.’

I also had the pleasure of moderating a lively panel discussion (that was also titled “Is Enterprise Search Ripe for Open Source Disruption?”) at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference two weeks ago. Participating on the panel were:

• Jerome Pesenti, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder, Vivisimo
• Marc Krellenstein, Chief Technology Officer, Lucid Imagination
• Sid Probstein, Chief Technology Officer, Attivio
• Stephen “The Search Guy” Green, Senior Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems Laboratories

Jerome Pesenti put up a good fight and provided the strongest opposition to the idea that open source was ready for enterprise use. Marc Krellenstein, as expected, was the most vocal proponent for open source. In addition, Sid Probstein and Stephen Green contributed their unique perspectives. Sid’s company, Attivio, uses Lucene in their product. Stephen Green is the author of an open source search engine called Minion. Although, somewhat contentious (and loud) at times, the conversation highlighted many of the opportunities and concerns with using open source for enterprise search.

For those of you attending the Burton Group Catalyst Conference later this month, be sure to sit in on the session “Open Source Search: Good Stuff Cheap (With a Few Caveats)” where I will be providing an overview of the topic and discussing the open source products Lucene, Solr, Nutch, Xapian, Flax, OpenPipeline, and SMILA.

Open Source 3C Telebriefing Tuesday and Wednesday

Blogger: Larry Cannell

For those of you interested in open source software (especially that of the communication, collaboration, and content management variety) I am pleased to say that I will be hosting this week’s Burton Group telebriefings, taking place tomorrow (Tuesday) and Wednesday. The title is “Open Source Communication, Collaboration, and Content Management: Cutting-Edge Innovation, Low-Cost Imitation, or Both?” Here is the brief description of the telebriefing that was sent to Burton Group customers:

Open source software is moving up the enterprise stack to provide communication, collaboration, and content management (3C) solutions. Among several factors, the combination of well-executed open source projects and inexpensive Internet services is fueling the development of cutting-edge and low-cost solutions that are scalable and robust, and which operate websites and services used by millions on the Internet. In this Burton Group TeleBriefing, Senior Analyst Larry Cannell provides insight into what is driving the development of open source 3C and how enterprises should approach its use.

I plan on having plenty of examples of open source 3C and look forward to answering your questions and hearing your feedback. If you haven’t signed up yet there is still time. Just fill out the form here.

Microsoft’s Courtship of Open Source Developers

Blogger: Larry Cannell

Last week at the MIX ‘09 conference Microsoft announced the beta release of its Web Platform Installer 2.0. This is a framework and utility for downloading, installing, and maintaining web applications built for the Microsoft Web Platform. What I found interesting is the open source applications which can be installed by the tool and are available in the Web App Gallery. These include popular PHP-based open source applications like Drupal, Gallery, and Wordpress. This isn’t the first time Microsoft has offered downloads like this but it is probably slickest and more convenient packaging they’ve done so far. In addition, the company has been working with the PHP community to improve how their apps work with Microsoft’s IIS web server and SQL Server databases for some time now. This might be a good option if you are interested in learning more about the open source products available through the gallery and are an all-Microsoft shop.

But, will this sway any open source developers to start building their applications on a Microsoft platform? For existing open source projects, probably not. The installer tool doesn’t offer any compelling features that would sway these projects to switch. However, it might be useful for some new open source projects whose developers prefer a Microsoft platform.

Microsoft is also offering 60-days free hosting through six of their partners. However, the pricing of Windows hosting is still generally much higher than Linux. This may be the biggest barrier for Microsoft to cross in order to convince more open source projects to develop on their platform.

Border Disputes in Enterprise Use of Open Source 3C

Blogger: Larry Cannell

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts intended to help IT managers understand open source licensing and its implications. In this post I cover the risk of inadvertently licensing proprietary software as open source by mixing it with a GPL-licensed product.

Recall that my research focuses on the use of communication, collaboration, and content management (3C) solutions within enterprises. As it turns out, a large number of the leading open source 3C products are licensed under the GPL. So care must be taken if organizations choose to integrate these products with enterprise systems. The concern has to do with the GPL’s Copyleft provision, which states that a system must be licensed under the GPL if any GPL-licensed source code was used to create it and it was distributed. A previous blog post discussed hereditary and permissive open source licenses in more detail.

But let’s say this up-front, if your plans do not include modifying the source code of (or integrating with) a GPL-licensed product, or if you have no intention to distribute any software which involves GPL-licensed software (either linked or integrated with another system) then you should have nothing to worry about.

The issue I want to highlight here is where organizations are considering integrating a GPL-licensed product with an enterprise system. In some cases it is fairly straightforward to determine if a piece of software falls under the GPL. For example, if a developer links their source code with GPL-licensed source code then the resulting program is considered a derived work and would have to be licensed under the GPL, if it were distributed.

In her book “The Open Source Alternative: Understanding Risks and Leveraging Opportunities” Heather Meeker does a good job describing the “border dispute” of the Copyleft provision in the GPL. The problem is the GPL itself is not always clear as to what defines a program that is considered derived from GPL software. Meeker is very good at setting the scope of the issues and then exploring a number of scenarios regarding the applicability of Copyleft.

However, while Meeker’s background and analysis is interesting I don’t intend to explore the legal issues brought on by the GPL in cases such as loadable kernel modules in Linux or proprietary operating systems running within a Xen host. What I want to briefly touch on here are the issues surrounding the use of GPL-licensed software within enterprise environments, most notably those which may have to integrate with corporate systems.

So let’s explore these issues by going through two scenarios:

1. Configuring Drupal to use an enterprise’s directory system. For example, an enterprise uses Microsoft Active Directory as a central source of usernames and passwords. Should we be concerned with integrating Active Directory with a Drupal installation via an LDAP interface using the LDAP integration module?
2. Surfacing data originating from an enterprise system within a sidebar on a blog running WordPress. For example, the latest sales numbers are displayed on a blog written by a marketing director, via a plugin which pulls data from their proprietary sales tracking system.

At first it may not be obvious that either of these scenarios would qualify as a derived work and be subjected to Copyleft. In both cases the GPL-licensed products involved (Drupal or WordPress) would probably not run on the same computers as the proprietary systems with which they are communicating.

To get some guidance we can refer to the Free Software Foundation. As Meeker says in her book: “The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is in some ways the de facto enforcer of the GNU General Public License (GPL).” To help clarify these types of questions about the GPL, the FSF has a frequently asked question list on their website. The answer to the question “I'd like to incorporate GPL-covered software in my proprietary system. Can I do this?” provides some illumination as to how the GPL applies to the above scenarios. It says in part:

“However, in many cases you can distribute the GPL-covered software alongside your proprietary system. To do this validly, you must make sure that the free and non-free programs communicate at arms length, that they are not combined in a way that would make them effectively a single program.”

In other words, it matters a great deal how a GPL-licensed program integrates with a proprietary system, regardless of whether they are on the same system (and, we should also note, given the pervasive connectivity of the Internet, it doesn’t matter if the two systems are on the same network of even in the same company). If they operate as a single program then the FSF considers them a single program now subject to Copyleft.

So, the key is to be able to demonstrate that the two systems involved can still be considered separate. In the first scenario (Drupal using Active Directory) communication between the two systems is done via a well-known protocol (LDAP). All of the software used in the Drupal system can operate as a separate entity by connecting to any LDAP-compatible directory, not just this particular Active Directory. The two systems are clearly separate programs.

The second scenario is less clear. In her book Meeker suggests “to focus on the spirit of the GPL rather than its letter” and goes on to say the degree in which the proprietary code can be considered a “black box” will help clarify whether there is sufficient “arms length” (as the FSF describes it above) between the two.

If the proprietary sales tracking system was custom-written by company employees and the company wrote a custom extension to serve the data along with a custom WordPress plugin to pull the data and display it within the blog, then this sounds like two systems performing as a single program and subject to Copyleft, if either of the two were distributed.

On the other extreme, let’s say the company purchased a widely available sales tracking system, which provides sales data in RSS feed, and an RSS feed is fetched by a WordPress RSS plugin (which can be used with any RSS feed) that simply displays the feed items on the blog. This certainly seems to qualify as a “black box” and the two systems can be considered separate.

In closing, while is makes sense for enterprises to use GPL-licensed software (after all, a large number of the leading open source 3C products are GPL-licensed) care must be taken when integrating them with proprietary systems.

The Roles Open Source Can Play in an Enterprise Vendor's Business

Blogger: Larry Cannell

This is the third in a series of blog posts intended to help IT managers understand open source licensing and its implications. In this post I cover the roles an open source product can play in an enterprise vendor’s business (which are enabled by open source licenses) and what this means for the enterprise itself.

A previous post discussed the four key levers of open source licensing that can support a vendor’s business model:

1. Hereditary versus permissive licensing (and the impact of Copyleft)
2. Source code ownership rights
3. Limitations around attribution
4. What defines “distribution”

These levers are important to enabling the roles a vendor intends a software product to play in support of their business objectives, which are listed below. I’ll go through each of these in detail:

• Commoditizing a Function
• Increasing Accessibility to Code, But Retaining Ownership
• Sustaining a Community
• Delivering Services
• Providing Support

Commoditizing a Function: This role is enabled by permissive open source licenses. For example, the Apache web server has commoditized basic web serving. Large companies like IBM have been the biggest contributors to these types of projects, often supplying the most developers and even contributing code that becomes the basis of new projects.

Nearly all open source products benefit from these products since they provide the foundation for other opportunities (e.g., LAMP-based solutions). IBM benefits by incorporating these in commercial product offerings, enabling contributions to come from a wider audience of developers (thereby sharing some cost), providing a forum to explore new technologies and standards (reducing risk and increasing interoperability), and reducing the chance of competing technologies from becoming standards (for example, the Apache web server has remained the most popular web server despite efforts from companies like Microsoft).

Increasing Accessibility to Code, But Retaining Ownership: This role is enabled by dual licensing of software. In particular, companies have licensed software they own with both a proprietary license and a hereditary open source license, such as the GPL. The classic example of this is MySQL. In the content management market, Alfresco is a good example.

The key to enabling this dual licensing approach is having ownership rights to the source code. For example, take a look at the Sun Contributor Agreement. The author of a contribution that makes it into the core product must give ownership rights to Sun.

In this role the GPL discourages competitors from incorporating MySQL source code into a proprietary product (since distributing the resulting product would require it to be licensed under the GPL) while also increasing visibility enabling others to interoperate with it. Nearly every Linux distribution comes packaged with the GPL version of MySQL, making it an easy choice for many developers to use. I’m sure Alfresco would love to have the same type of relationship with Linux at some point.

Sustaining a Community: For all of the complaints made against the GPL (mostly by commercial software vendors) it is hard to dispute the success of a number of communities supporting GPL-licensed products. For example, the  Drupal community has over 350,000 members and the Wordpress community has produced over 4,200 plugins. These are extremely active communities and are examples of what many established commercial vendors have been striving to build for years.

None of the main commercial entities involved in these products (Acquia for Drupal and Automattic for Wordpress) control the source code, nor license it separately. The GPL seems to level the playing field, enabling community members to compete on aspects other than proprietary software offerings. Rather, community members use the source code as a basis for competing in downstream markets such as custom website development, various types of services, and support. The result is a robust open source product that incorporates cutting-edge innovations at a pace commercial software vendors have difficulty matching.

Delivering Services: One of the ways Acquia and Automattic leverage their open source products is to provide services and support. For example, basic hosted Wordpress.com blogs are free. But, Automattic also provides premium blogging services as well as software support for enterprises. Acquia also provides support and later this year will offer site hosting and a premium site-search service (based on Solr, an Apache-licensed product, and provided via a Drupal module). Of course, many online service providers use open source software. The most recognizable being Google and Yahoo.

Providing Support: Although community leaders (such as Acquia, Alfresco, and Automattic) offer paid support services for their open source products, there are also companies that provide support for a broader selection. These include OpenLogic and SpringSource. For example, OpenLogic provides support for MediaWiki (the software which runs Wikipedia) as well as hundreds of other open source products including development tools.

Most enterprises will need some type of commercial support for open source products, unless they intend to maintain a staff with sufficient skills to do it themselves. So which type of support should you use, a contract with a community leader or a support-only vendor? Each situation can be different but, in most cases, I would first consider going with the community leader (since this contributes to the long-term viability of the product), unless the use of the product is limited and the risk of problems low. Either way, I think there is room in the market for both types of open source vendors and their positioning will be sorted out over time.

Clearly, open source products need viable community leaders and these companies will likely provide the best support. However, enterprises can only be expected to maintain so many vendor relationships and there are literally hundreds of opportunities for enterprises to use open source (many, of which, do not have a commercial entities behind them) so the open source support vendors should have plenty of business to go after.

What does this all mean to enterprises wanting to use open source solutions? When considering a particular open source product,first understand the role it plays in the plans of vendors supporting it.

• Products with strong communities behind them will tend to be more innovative, likely have enterprise support options, and be around for some time.
• Those products without strong communities need to be assessed as if they were a commercial product being sold by the vendor providing support.
• If they have neither a strong community nor a viable commercial vendor behind them, either reconsider your options or proceed with caution and look for signs that the community will continue growing.

The key is understanding the long-term viability of an open source product, whether it is backed by a vendor or a community.

In my next post I will discuss some of the risks involved with open source licensing, thoughts on mitigating these risks, and open questions that still remain.