Cloud computing is one of the hot topics in today’s IT discussions. No large vendor without an announcement on how to offer cloud computing services and platforms. No software product vendor not worrying about how to make his offering cloud computing aware or riding the cloud computing wave. This has in principle nothing to do with Open Source. However there are similarities in perception. Open Source became popular partially because people hoped to save money in software development and solution implementation. With cloud computing again people expect to save money on hosting and service provisioning by leveraging low cost computer power. To be able to offer low cost computer power Open Source of course comes into the game again. Open Source infrastructure just scales more economically than proprietary systems. And of course the nirvana is to host low cost software on low cost computing power. And if the purpose to provide low cost software access – is to attract large audiences and become a next facebook or youtube then you are probably better off planning with Open Source from the beginning otherwise you will not be able to pay the bills when you scale. So, cloud computing has nothing to do with Open Source by nature, but in reality the two things are quite well connected.P.S. Of course there are Open Source cloud computing components and elements out there, including the ones listed on EOS Directory, such as Globus Nimbus, OpenNebula and – Eucalyptus.

The creation of the Enterprise Open Source Directory (short: EOS Directory) in 2007 by Optaros has been triggered by a clear need of enterprises and organizations asking for help and advice to identify and select Open Source technologies. With roughly 250 Open Source platforms, solutions and frameworks listed and rated initially, EOS was able to establish itself as a source of reference in this space. Since then EOS Directory has continuously grown, listing more than 350 projects today and building up a vibrant community of visitors and input contributors. The EOS Directory Blog has become one of the key voices in the Open Source scene.In early 2009 Optaros has handed over the EOS Directory platform to Bruno von Rotz, a well known Open Source specialist and consultant and the initial sponsor of the initiative. To strengthen the neutral approach to ratings and selection of the technologies, the new EOS Directory Advisory and Expert Board has been established over the last weeks. Initial members of the EOS Directory Advisory and Expert Board include Aleksander Farstad, Ce?dric Walter, David Nu?scheler, Gianugo Rabellino, Roberto Galoppini, Hannes Gassert, Hans Waarle, Joel Gardet, Matt Asay, Matthias Geisler, Michael Hanisch, Olivier Pe?pin, Raju Bitter, Ralf Hauser, Seth Gottlieb, Stephen Walli and Tiberiu Fustos, representing user and provider communities as well as international expert audiences. The Advisory and Expert Board will be both instrumental in guiding the future development of the EOS Directory Platform as well as in making sure that the content is accurate, relevant and fairly represented.During the next months the EOS Directory Platform will also be rejuvenated and updated to even better support Enterprises and Organizations in need for Open Source technologies’ selection and evaluation help.

We all know, it’s not that easy to make money with Open Source. While Open Source has proven to be a great marketing (and distribution) tool, the implementation of Open Source based business models that are both profitable and scalable, have proven to be difficult. If you can’t sell the software you are missing an important revenue generator of traditional software companies. To compensate for this many commercial open source companies have created so called “enterprise versions” of their software, in most cases sold under a non-open-source license in subscription form. Enterprise version typically include additional features important to large companies – LDAP integration is one of the most common ones – and come with additional service packages such as extended compatibility testing, maintenance or support. – So far so good. But the license models applied can be very restrictive sometimes, asking for the rights on all modifications and developments done by the client for example. In the worst case this could mean that if a company decides to no longer pay for the subscription, the future use of the software installed is no longer permitted and all code developed or changed has to be shipped to the software provider. This is clearly far away from the ideas driving the Open Source movement. And of course many of the commercial Open Source companies apply a much more “free” model. So, maybe we need a FAIR TRADE label to separate the “good” ones from the “bad” ones? You may want to say that Open Source as such wanted to make this distinction already. But as we see there’s constant evolution and some of it may not show into the right direction.

There has been a discussion for quite a while on whether there are good open source business solutions out there and to what extent these projects could replace proprietary software solutions. It clearly seems that it’s quite industry specific on whether you can find such sollutions or not. The telco industry made some efforts, but the most visible results clearly seem to come from the public sector, namely government solutions. In a recent announcement Blackduck highlights the value of open source technologies in the health care industry. Since Obama announced that he wants to push open source in this field, the interest is high of course. Blackduck estimates that the identified 800 health care open source projects represent a value of roughly USD 6 billion – or 31’000 staff years of work. That’s quite impressive. Even if not all of this is top class software and even if it doesn’t fit specific needs in a given country or context, this is a highly valuable knowledge and code base to start to work from.In the past we haven’t included a lot of industry specific software in EOS Directory despite the fact that we ran across quite a number of very useful technologies. We may need to change that decision.

Matt Asay has posted a very good summarizing presentation on the state of open source usage in enterprises and on how open source helps to go through the crisis.The title of the presentation is: Bailing out your business with open source.Have a look yourself!

View more Keynote presentations from mjasay.