Open Solutions Alliance: yet another advocacy group?

The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), is a new advocacy group debuting next February 15 at LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York.

OSA exhibitor info says:

The Open Solutions Alliance consists of leading companies dedicated to making enterprise-class open source software solutions work together. We help customers put open source solutions to work by enabling application integration, certifying quality solutions, and promoting cooperation among open source developers. Membership is open to organizations providing high-quality, business-ready open source solutions.

OSA’s speech, scheduled on the 15th of February is the following:

Open Solutions Alliance forms to promote Interoperability between Open Source Solutions.

OSA founders are not giving details yet about members’ names, but an anonymous interviewee reported that at least 10 companies have already signed up. OSA insider told Linux.com that:

[the group will be] focusing on business use of open source apps. Other, earlier open source advocacy groups have concentrated on legal and licensing matters, and that even the ones that have done direct open source advocacy have mainly worked with open source infrastructure, like Linux and Apache, rather than open source applications.

OSA’s focus seems to be addressing the third challenge, trying to offer the inter-applications interoperability that open source products are lacking of.

In other words, OSA hopes to become a national — possibly even worldwide — trade association for commercial open source vendors, similar in many ways to the trade associations that serve proprietary software vendors.

Will this last technological club work, eventually?