OpenSource Everywhere

It seems that at least once a day I receive an e-mail announcement regarding another commercialized open source product. Last Friday it was another on-demand CRM system, today it was a portal. Seems like the folks over at ObjectWeb are a well kept secret, with a listing of somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 different open source (GPL & LGPL) projects designed for the enterprise. Application servers, portals, content management, databases and IDE plug-ins are just a few categories amongst the lengthy list of projects you can peruse, download and enjoy.

The problem with such products isn't support or interoperability. The former is offered by many vendors for the commercialized version of their products and the latter is taken care of by the OSS community's dedication to standards. The problem is likely to be support and integration from third party vendors.

This could be an issue for application vendors like those providing CRM and workflow solutions who do not directly support open source platforms such as JOnAS. Consumer focused ISVs have traditionally refused to support customers whose systems do not meet specific requirements, such as OS and browser type, and the same could potentially become an issue for enterprise class vendors.Thus far it hasn't been issue - ISVs currently provide support for their applications running on Tomcat and JBoss, even though both are OSS and are not generally listed as "supported" platforms. As long as ISVs continue to support OSS, this trend is likely to continue and may begin to impose on the market share traditionally held by ISVs.