There's a lot of Open Source projects out there being used by a lot of people, all with different ideas about the best place to be in an adoption curve.

OpenLogic has a bunch of enterprise customers, but they're really composed of dozens or hundreds of little sub-companies in the form of departments or internal projects. Each group breaks down further into developer teams that contain individual developers.

Every one of these developers inside each of the teams wants something a little different. Developer A always wants to be on the bleeding edge; if the release is more than 3 days old, it's obsolete. Developer B is risk-averse and only wants the rock-solid, production-ready version that's been battle tested for years. Developer C is somewhere in the middle, wanting stability, but not at the expense of the more interesting key features.

Somewhere in all of this mix is a set of development and project managers, some release managers, IT people, VP's of Engineering, Infrastructure, IT, etc., at least one CTO, and a CIO. All of these people have their own pressure points and thoughts around technology adoption.

With this reality, it's fairly clear that there will never be a one-size-fits-all solution to any development problem. Oh, there will be various executive initiatives, grass roots movements, and other forces acting upon the enterprise, but as people come and go and technologies change as they invariably do, new circumstances and techniques will present themselves that require new solutions.

Is it any wonder that there are many competing Open Source projects in the wild? Does it surprise anybody that users would choose one version over another?

No, I think we're just seeing the beginning of a new era. One where fine-grained Open Source projects can be integrated into highly-configurable solutions that fit specific needs. An era where the next Open Source project to come along with eschew this kind of integration and go back to a fully cohesive, tightly-coupled stack for maximum performance and ease of use. An era where projects will rebel against tightly integrated components and start the cycle all over again at fine-grained components.

An era of choice.

If you don't like the weather right now, stick around for a few minutes. We're embarking on a voyage where you can choose desert, rain forest, mountains, or beach and change your mind any time you like without losing your luggage. Welcome to Open Source with Choice.