The number Linux distributions are overwhelming. There is almost a flavour to suite most specialised needs. But organisations need a view on the range of Operating Systems and their capabilities.

A good site to look at is the http://polishlinux.org.

It does paired comparisons of 19 different Linux variants.

Many vendors are emerging in the International and local (South African) scene:

A list of vendors to look at this far include:

• Novell
  Red Hat
  Obsidian
  Systems    Business Systems Group
  TSI-Local Systems
  Arivia.kom
  Tetra-Information Services
  ATOS
  Jumping Bean
  Cerebra
  Astidian
  i-kno
  GlobeTOM
  Gijima AST

No catgorisation has been done on the offerings yet… stay tuned.

The Coin Phase that Doesn’t Seem to Cut it…

When one looks at contemporary documentaries, and start diving deeping into the concerns of industry users of Open Source technology, one starts to quicky realise that its not about “Open Source”. The name was coined as part of the growth period of the FOSS movement, but it does not reflect the thinking in its entirety.

In fact, Open Source is about more than “free source” and sharing. The new wave of OSS shifts really look at new commercially viable, industry grade Open Source business model, support structures, skills development and open standards. Finding a term to embody these ideas could be a tough call, yet may have some merit. Open Source is already stigmatized by the financial industry, branded as a paradigm with an immature process with “some good technologies” by several players.

Will OSS just fade into the background? Is it a “wait and see” scenario? It will depend on your viewpoint and the industry that you are playing in. The outlook for SMEs seem different to that of large corporates, and the industries also differ substantially in their opinion.

Bringing the real facts to the table will be the most important part of OSS. Objective education is needed, not “false benefit” advertising. The core problem resides with the understanding of OSS - what it means and where its going. The problem therein lies the fact that OS is a fragmented movement with one philosophy, but many directions. This lack of central vision presents one of the biggest challenges to OS adoption.

Can this scatter brain, social development movement be harnessed to present some good solutions, or are we all just suffering from the afterschock of the OS hype?

Things to ponder.

A selection of attributes to evaluate OSS vendors.

Locality
Several vendors are present in the Open Source market. Understanding the locality of support (i.e. regional marketing and development support services or purely international). This attribute contributes to the viability of an Open Source vendor as a supplier.

Service Offering Breadth
The breadth of offering provides insight into how diverse a vendor offering is and enables organisations to make use of a single vendor to manage a comprehensive set of services around a selection of products. More services are often regarded as better, but need to be traded off against the capacity of the vendor company to deliver and maintain solutions.
Product Offering Breadth The breadth of offering provides insight into the Open Source vendor’s ability to provide skills in various categories of products, A narrow range can indicate specialisation, where a broad range may be useful in providing a comprehensive solution offering to a large institution. Breadth needs to be viewed against service breadth and capacity to build a big picture view of vendors in the landscape.

Product (s) Community Size
Community support is often the backbone and support system for many established open source products. A large community is used as a support strength indicator.
Projecting many products into a single rating can be misleading. The approach in this measurement is to find the community strength of products relative to their functional classifications and find the appropriate average for the products out of the sample under investigation.

Product Community Activity
A similar, but even more crucial attribute related to the activity of communities. As an example, large communities may not be active for extended periods, which may lead to a lag in updates and fixes required in a corporate setting.

Licensing Structures
Several licence agreements exist for products that commercial Open Source vendors use. These licenses to place some restrictions on the usage and modifications of the Open Source products. Less restriction are often regarded as favourable, but also requires the necessary details to protect the corporate organisation, should any loopholes be present that may lead to significant risks.
License structures are not included in this report.
Year Experience New start-up organisations may have experienced developers, but are not established (from a performance brand or client reputation point of view.
This attribute considers the age of the company in the market and its visibility from a client portfolio perspective.
Supporting Case Studies Established commercial vendors develop case studies to indicate the type of work and client that was involved in a project delivery cycle. The existence and content of case studies either by vendor or independent research organisations is considered an indicator of success and an example industry strength application,

Company Size (capacity)
The company size provides information around the capacity that an Open Source vendor has in order to scale resources to the needs of the large corporate environment.
Smaller companies may however have appropriate sourcing strategies in place through contracting agreements to better serve growing and declining needs. Larger companies (or sourcing agreements) indicate a capability to ensure more reliable capacity.
Client Portfolio The type of clients provides an indication as to the industrial nature of the Open Source vendor’s application and capabilities. Some information can be extracted from case studies and public information.

Partner Network

A strong partner network also builds the credibility of an Open Source Vendor.
Membership Where applicable, additional certifications and accredited membership status contributes to the overall capabilities of Open Source vendors to deliver solutions professionally.

Roadmap and Vision
Even though Open Source products are highly fragmented, commercial vendors need to deliver on a vision for their product, steering it into a direction that is forward thinking and provides large corporate organisations with a clear path to manage risk and conduct planning for future implementations. An indication of directions score favourably, where the absence of a roadmap score less favourable.