Welcome to the Cool Table

Sometimes as I look at ISV (independent software vendors) I am reminded of my old high school cafeteria. Numerous cliques segregated neatly into groups in the farthest flung reaches of the room. Back then it was jocks, band buddies, druggies, and nerds.

Presently, I look at ISV groups as the commercial proprietary, commercial open source, SaaS (software as a service), and hosted solutions. As the open source guys sometimes you feel like the outcasts, but this week as the open source masses descended on Portland for OSCON, I kind of feel like I am sitting at the cool kids table. There were a number of announcements by companies adopting OSI-approved licenses for their software. Here are the ones that turned my head:

• Our buddy whurley at BMC announced his open source licensing strategy stating that BMC will start to offer a number of projects under the OSI-approved BSD license. Good Job, William, nice start. I am patiently waiting to see if Remedy or Patrol are going to make the list. [Cote has some great analysis]
• Also, our friends at SugarCRM also announced they would be releasing their next version of SugarCRM community under the open source license. We love SugarCRM they have been extremely generous with their time helping to educate us on how to run a business with an open source project at its core.
• Intel also open sourced their Threading Multicore Building blocks under the GPL.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see other interesting announcements this week and at the LinuxWorld Expo in two weeks. Bottom line — it feels good to have more kids at the cool table.