The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) eventually debuted at LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit, as previously mentioned. Ten leading companies announced to join the OSA consortium dedicated to driving adoption of comprehensive open source business solutions.
Founding members include Adaptive Planning, Centric CRM, CollabNet, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, JasperSoft, Openbravo, SourceForge.net®, SpikeSource and Talend.
Barry Klawans, OSA spokesperson and CTO at JasperSoft, stated:
We’re inviting all companies developing and using open source software to work together and ensure the availability of turnkey, enterprise-ready solution suites faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional proprietary alternatives.
While we don’t know yet if this last technological club will eventually work, Stephen Walli expressed some concerns:
I had a little experience with CentricCRM pretending to be an open source company a year ago while I was still at Optaros. I read their license then, and it hasn’t changed. Here’s how it starts:
You may use, copy, modify, and make derivative works from the code for internal use only.
You may not redistribute the code, and you may not sublicense copies or derivatives of the code, either as software or as a service.
This is of course the community version of their “open source” solution.
False positive are dangerous, and I hope OSA will soon push its members to adopt a clear strategy, calling themselves open source companies only if appropriate.
Definitely agree about false positives in the open source arena.
I’m 100% sure that the # of incidents of inaccurately claiming “we’re open source” is going to increase as fast as interest in open source does.
But that is something everyone in the “community” will have to watch for and call bullsh*t on as needed.