Professional open-source grows up

IDG News Service - Once a concept thought to be oxymoronic, the business of open-source software is now working its way through adolescence to full-blown maturity. And the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco this week proved that like the teen years, the transition brings growing pains.

As a new wave of applications vendors begin to take center stage in the open-source market -- replacing software infrastructure vendors such as JBoss Inc. and MySQL AB as the industry's up-and-comers -- consolidation threatens to consume some of those more established companies that led the first-wave of making a viable business model out of open-source.

In fact, Atlanta-based JBoss itself was rumored to be a target of acquisition by Oracle Corp. as the OSBC opened on Tuesday. Instead, the Redwood Shores, Calif., company announced it would purchase embedded open-source database maker Sleepycat Software Inc., another early entrant into the professional open-source market.

While market pioneers go to bed at night wondering which technology powerhouse may own them in the morning, start-up applications vendors are champing at the bit to make their mark using the business model that MySQL and JBoss made popular, and which now has the backing of more established companies like IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc. That model is to offer open-source software with a free license, while using professional services, maintenance and support for these products to derive revenue.

Once a niche play, this model has become completely acceptable in big deployments as part of software infrastructure -- the plumbing layer that includes an operating system, application server, database and other software on which end-user applications are built. This stack of software has become credible enough to have its own name -- the Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python (LAMP) stack -- and its establishment has made way for applications vendors to jockey for position higher up the open-source food chain.

"As predicted, open-source is moving up the stack," said Richard Daley, CEO of Pentaho Corp., during a demonstration at the OSBC of his company's open-source business intelligence application.

Daley's company was one of a host of other upstart applications vendors that were invited to showcase their wares at OSBC. Among them was the new darling of professional open-source, SugarCRM Inc., which offers customer relationship management software. Another was Project.net, a company with a project portfolio management tool that recently decided to open-source its software because selling software licenses was no longer cost-effective, said its CEO Peter Windston.


"We realized we can drive this [company] a lot faster with an open-source model rather