I just returned from Germany where I spoke on The Open Source Census at the Open Source Meets Business conference.  At the same conference, HP announced the FOSSBazaar initiative, which OpenLogic is sponsoring along with Olliance Group, Novell, Google, Coverity, DLA Piper, SourceForge and The Linux Foundation.  The press release and presentation on FOSSBazaar has generated a lot of confusion.  In his blog, Dana Blankenhorn states

“The press releases for Fossology and Fossbazaar seem aimed mainly at branding these initiatives as HP’s when in fact they’re nothing of the kind.  A who’s who is backing them, including the Linux Foundation, Google, Novell, Olliance Group, OpenLogic, SourceForge, DLA Piper and Coverity.”

I’ve already received several calls and emails wondering whether HP is now competing with OpenLogic.  So I thought I’d share my views on the FOSSBazaar initiative as well as the announcement.  Although this initiative was started and led by HP, it is designed to be backed and supported by many in the open source ecosystem.  The FOSSBazaar website describes it this way:

“…an open source community web site of technology and industry leaders who have come together to accelerate adoption of free and open source software in the enterprise.”

That description is why we signed on to sponsor FOSSBazaar.  In Dana Blankenhorn’s blog, he seems to see the announcement on open source governance as planting fear.  The enterprises we encounter, though, are eager for information and help on how to better use and manage open source in their organizations.  FOSSBazaar will provide that information, expertise and advice in a free and open forum.  Ideally, FOSSBazaar will bring the best aspects of open source communities to bear on that topic. 

Just as no single member of a large open source community would claim responsibility for all the results, FOSSBazaar will need to follow these same open source community norms.  In HP’s desire to talk about their leadership on FOSSBazaar, they may have lost sight of the open and community aspects.  HP’s press release included a list of services they want to sell around open source governance, which seemed to blur the line between the free offerings of FOSSBazaar and HP’s for-pay offerings.  Those details of HP’s open source services may have been better left for a different forum or separate press release.   

One of the biggest points of confusion among people I’ve talked to is over what FOSSology does and how that compares to OSS Discovery, an open source tool OpenLogic released in December.  The short answer is that they are complementary.  OSS Discovery can be used to discover which open source packages are installed on your machines (providing package names and versions), regardless of license.  FOSSology can be used to search for open source licenses in a set of source or binary code.  We think enterprises will use these tools together – to identify open source packages and then identify the licenses.  Whichever tool enterprises need, they are both open source and freely available.

Bottom line, we think that FOSSBazaar can be a valuable resource for enterprises, despite some confusion around the announcement.   Our intention is to work with all of the participants in FOSSBazaar to ensure that it is a valuable resource helping enterprises to become more knowledgeable about open source governance issues and therefore more comfortable in using open source software.