Stuart Cohen, former CEO of OSDL launched a new company in May. The Collaborative Software Initiative offers a comprehensive set of services to take a project from the assessment phase through its lifecycle and beyond. The practice of collaboration I hear a lot of people talk about collaboration. It kind of makes us all feel warm and fuzzy, right? No one is going to tell you they don’t want to collaborate in to The practice of collaboration I hear a lot of people talk about collaboration. It kind of makes us all feel warm and fuzzy, right? No one is going to tell you they don’t want to collaborate in today’s market. The problem is “collaboration” is so overused that it has come to mean many different things to many different people.For the latest generation of 20-somethings, it’s the buzzword for building social networks online. For the Linux community, it’s about all the ecosystem stakeholders truly working together. But for a growing number of business and IT managers, it’s a tool for completing non-core software projects that meet compliance and regulatory requirements. What’s even more interesting is that these IT professionals are collaborating with competitors within their own industries (i.e., financial services or state governments) in order to get the work done, split the cost and gain the efficiencies from everyone using the same code. We are finding that there is a class of applications that better serves everyone in a business ecosystem where shared code translates into shared data and simplified compliance. This is why I’m excited about the company I founded a few months ago – Collaborative Software Initiative – and want to thank Dave for letting me share that passion here. We are really bringing to market a whole new way for building software among like-minded companies. We think it will change the way software is developed and subsequently the economy of software. We’re looking forward to announcing our first project in the coming months, which will provide a vivid example of this evolution. Something I also want to mention here is that CSI is not an open source software company in the traditional sense. We start with the customers to understand shared issues that can best be addressed with a collaborative approach, versus the creation of a single open source project that needs to be enhanced or supported. Due to my history, many people have gotten that confused. But the approach most definitely borrows best practices from the open source development model by bringing together stakeholders with a common need to build “community” software that uses an open source development stack but can run on any user’s operating system of choice. The bottom line is we’re on the verge of a market transition for enterprise business and IT managers. A very good market transition. Open Source