Open Source Consortium begins its life in London

Posted on 1 Dec 2004 at 15:02

Yesterday saw the first convening of the Open Source Consortium (OSC) in London.

The OSC is a coalition of more than 60 UK Open Source service, training and support providers with the common aim of offering an unbiased viewpoint for companies considering moving to open source software.

OSC Executive Director, Mark Taylor said, 'The Open Source movement is fast achieving definition as it evolves from the nascent fervour of its protagonists into a credible corporate alternative. That definition requires an independent voice. We are minded to question, then, whether proprietary vendors can be entrusted with the future of Open Source deployment across Europe. With this in mind we aim to liaise with the UK and EU authorities on establishing clear guidelines to safeguard the ascendance of this exciting new alternative.'

Indeed, the Linux big guns are aiming their sales teams squarely at the corporate and public sector markets, with Red Hat alone the only pure open source company at this level. The likes of IBM and Novell offer a mix of proprietary software running on Linux-based platforms.

They argue that proprietary dollars help fund their open source developers and thus their contribution to the open source community. Sceptics suggest they are simply using the success of open source to promote their own proprietary products.

Major open source providers such as these are - at least for now - only interested in selling at a government and corporate level and often provide the support contracts themselves. Directing the growth of open source software in this way filters in a deal of proprietary products.

On a smaller scale, the SME sector for example is of less interest to the top Linux sellers: it is simply inefficient to target many smaller customers with their sales force. Yet it is this sector that needs the local level support offered by the independent service providers of the OSC.

The OSC's worry is that the precedent set at a corporate level will filter down to the government and SME sector, with standard configurations for implementations including a range of proprietary products for which there might be equally good or better open source alternatives.

But this is not just the worry of the OSC. It was set up on the basis of demand from the public sector itself that an organisation should exist to offer unbiased information on what open-source software is available. They too realise that Novell, for example, would much prefer to sell them its own NetWare along with the open-source SUSE platform, than an open-source alternative.

'We represent an open source software 'pure-play' perspective,' said Taylor, 'There's no extra hardware or middleware platform to advocate.'

Taylor stressed though that the OSC is not lining up for a war with the likes of IBM. 'We're very happy with what IBM is doing with open source,' he said. And any company that can show the majority of its revenues come from open source software is eligible to join, so even big players such as Red Hat could theoretically take advantage of the OSC's special relationship with the UK's public sector.

The OSC also aims to address some of the perceived risks associated with a move to open source software by promoting case studies of successful implementations. Much of this is will itself come from the public sector. 'There are substantial deployments of open source software in the public sector that have been in place for almost a decade,' said Taylor.

For more information, visit the OSC website.

Author: Matt Whipp