Enterprising the open source

The cloud thickens on the strategy of the open source vendors….“The enterprise fraternity” are keen on acquiring smaller rival companies with open sourced software and after acquisition, only unveil a part of the software that remained open sourced before, Then doesn’t the whole idea of open source get flouted? Another heating debate could be on the possible reasons for acquiring such firms that are open sourced. Typically, an open sourced company is learnt to be earning from the product’s maintenance, installation and support unlike, their product counterparts that derive from the licensed product copies as well. So, there seems to be a basic clash on the ideals of the two entities. Is this strategy a result of the fear in the biggies that the smaller ones could eventually overtake them as they gather more supporters for open sourced version.

A historical data on some such developments on this front that testify this:-

Oracle acquired Innobase an open source software company and a developer of transactional database technology, the software was distributed under the GNU GPL open-source license and was bundled with MySQL. Currently, it is reportedly in talks to acquire three open-source companies to expand its customer base .In return, it announced a free, low-end version of its database software thus, letting the world know about their commitment to opensource. Oracle also plans to buy Jboss Inc ,another opensource company and a leader in the application server market .

IBM last year bought Gluecode Software,which offers an application server based on apache Geronimo project. The give and take business is not new as IBM bundles with WebSphere, and it contributed an embedded database called Derby to Apache.
Bea Systems open sourced a version of its relational database mapping tool “Kodo” under an Apache license, while continues to offer BEA Kodo under a closed source license.
Sun Microsystems looked at open source community to revive itself , open sourced Solaris and JES.

At some point this may be a good deal for the customer as now they have a quality, open, and a low-priced(a bit more) product which is now backed ie supported by a branded company. So I think the product which was originally “true open source software” turns to have only source open.

My concern is that people who contribute to the open source software (apart from the employees of the open source company) is a vast community of developers, architects, designers who believe in sharing knowledge much to the relief of the smaller firms or developers that cannot afford licensed copies. However, with such moves industry wide, would this give enough leverage & credit to the people who contribute to this wealth of information or who use this information. Wouldn’t then the trend to contribute and share knowledge, then discouraged if this trend of acquiring smaller open sourced cos by the big giants continue?

Open Ajax and Collaboration

..so the big guys finally collaborate to push AJAX in the opensource community. IBM, BEA Systems Inc., Borland International Inc., Novell Inc., Oracle Corp. and Red Hat
Inc., have formed a group to contribute code and work together to promote use of AJAX., they will call it Open Ajax. This group will promote the use of Ajax tools with which developers can build rich Internet applications. The tools essentially eliminate the need to refresh a Web page every time a user enters or receives new data.

IBM is to propose its Ajax Toolkit Framework , that framework supports multiple Ajax runtime tools and can be used to develop and debug applications.

Since in the portal front the world is going collaborative and AJAXed :) ,its good to see that even the top notch vendors are implementing or moving a part of their technology to opensource.

An Eye on Collaborative Portals

The New Year heralds new realizations derived from the bygone year’s developments and thus, exploring options in the Collaborative portals space. The concept of Collaborative portals was an extension of the idea from commercial to business and organization’s infrastructural needs. It always was a challenge to achieve a single point of access as the teams are geographically distributed and mobile. Employees want to locate and communicate directly in the context of business processes and their day-to-day applications. They do not want to launch separate tools to chat with colleagues, participate in discussion threads or check project status.

However, the big players have their plug-in applications that adhere to no one standard and thus a technology incompatibility had erupted. Devising specifications for Java users (JSR 168) has been one move in this direction. As today’s teams are geographically distributed and mobile. To meet the expectation of being insync, organizations are providing and enhancing the capabilities that can transform the way colleagues communicate, relate with each other and perform work activities.

May it be asynchronous or synchronous, real-time based, these collaborative tools have provided a electronic workspace to allow people to share documents, project plans, calendars in the same online location. Bulletin boards and Blogs are becoming the medium to share thoughts and ideas on a particular topic on the web. Interactive Content Management System (I call it iCMS) with version control,Shared database ,email, event messaging etc are becoming the vital part of the collaborative suite.

It’s the business that benefits when -
• Employees access the right enterprise information, business process and people contributing in their areas of expertise with new ideas ,past experiences.
• Distributed expertise can respond more quickly and accurately to access consolidated
systems, reducing travel and facilitating efficient communications.
• A fast and reliable information flow can improve responsiveness, reduces coordination costs.
• Use the portal as a collaboration forum for employees and partners to work together more efficiently without regular face-to-face meetings.


Where every vendor is busy building their collaboration stacks and not concentrating on the compatibility with other Collaborative platforms,still there is no answer to the question of interoperability between different collaborative platforms in external or internal business units.

With this in mind a new category of integration software may emerge to enable interoperability among disparate enterprise collaboration platforms.

Concluding this post ,I believe that the market for collaborative portals is still promising, A trend is noted towards moving from collaboration to an "WorkField" which will incorporate collaboration, e-Learning, expertise location/identification, Interactive content management System (iCMS) and self-service applications.

Sun's Collaborative Portal Server 7

Another big hit by Sun Microsystems Inc today by announcing major enhancements to the Java Enterprise System with a new version of the Sun Java System Portal Server(version 7) that will provide developers and customers with collaborative features and identity-based content through web-based applications.

As Collaborative Portals are speedily replacing the traditional portal features and architecture, Sun was a bit late but came with enhanced and the most needed capabilities of its Portal Server which will allow the easy creation of interactive communities of users and services, building community portals populated with collaborative content including RSS feeds, blogs and wikis.

The story of Collaborative technology is not new anymore ,Interwoven’s WorkSite (Document Collaboration), IBM lotus Quickplace, EMC Documentum e-room were the first one to include the Collaborative technology in their products.

Liferay Portal server 3.6 too have and support for the collaborative content including RSS feeds, blogs and wikis, but follows the Gropus and Role Concept that works more or less the same as Community Concept

Identity-based portals and community portals, when combined with Sun's leading support of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript) portal containers, allow users to experience the interactive power of the Web along with the personalization and rich application interfaces traditionally associated with the desktop.

Some of the enhancements made to the Sun Java System Portal Server 7 include:
**Delegated Administration Features -> enables end users with the ability to manage page layouts, reset passwords, and allow non-technical users the ability to manage common portal functions, thus freeing up IT resources .
** Tools to Create New Communities and Community Services -- including user communities, wikis, file sharing, blog integration, and an open interface to build and expand on these services.
** Sun is also incorporating the open Java DB, a Sun supported distribution of the Apache Derby database, in the Sun Java System Portal Server 7 for use in data storage.

More information can be found at: http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem

Jetspeed 2.0 Open Source Enterprise Portal

With the release of the Jetspeed 2.0 Open Source Enterprise Portal , I believe that Open Source Portals are in the way of changing their Portal Architecture not just by enhancing their Security components but also a combination of both LDAP and the Database as a Backend.

Now what kind of data Jetspeed 2.0 has put on LDAP and what all info is there in underlying database can only be gathered by rigorous evaluation of the product.
anyways….this release is fully-compliant with the Portlet Specification 1.0 (JSR-168). Jetspeed-2 has passed the TCK (Test Compatibility Kit) suite and is fully certified to the Java Portlet Standard.
Apache Portals Bridges project can be used to 'bridge' portals with existing technologies including Struts, JSF, PHP, Perl. For GUI designers, Jetspeed comes with several built-in templates used to decorate portals and portlets.