Vendors form open-source business alliance

Ten leading open-source software vendors have created a nonprofit consortium, dubbed the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), to push the adoption of more open-source technology in the business world.

The group made the announcement Wednesday at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York.

The founding companies are Adaptive Planning, Centric CRM, CollabNet, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, JasperSoft, Openbravo, SourceForge.net, SpikeSource, and Talend. They offer a wide range of open-source business software including business intelligence, business performance management, database, CRM (customer relationship management), ERP (enterprise resource planning) and systems management applications.

The members pledged to work on resolving open-source software interoperability issues to make it easier for business users to integrate products from different vendors. The OSA will also work with open-source independent software vendors, systems integrators and the open-source community in general to find ways to create better integrated and simpler to use software stacks.

Creating stacks of software components is a growing trend among open-source players as they compete with established stacks of operating systems, middleware, databases, and applications already offered by proprietary vendors.

The consortium first plans to define tools, frameworks and best practices around simpler application deployment and interoperability. It will also look to establish communities to work on specific projects as well as facilitate joint marketing campaigns for open-source business applications.

The group is actively seeking more members and has set up a Web site.