Recent M&A activity was the elephant in the room, pointing the way towards the most viable and successful open source business models. Last month the OSA predicted that, by year-end, the question of what are the "best practice" open source business models would be settled - We may be approaching that already.

Nonetheless there is room for improvement, especially according to the CIO panels. Representatives from ABN Amro, Golden Gate University, Rolls Royce, Silicon Valley Bank, Seagate, and the always irrepressible Tim Golden from Bank of America, described their use of open source. All shared their positive experiences and the reasons why open source was strategic in their organizations. Lower cost, less risk of lockin, ability to innovate with people outside their (and their vendors') organizations, and the spirit of open-ness and collaboration were all reasons for using open source. But all cited a pattern of open source products lacking the same polish, "fit and finish" of typical proprietary products, "an over-emphasis on elegant technical solutions at the expense of better deployment experiences, better documentation, better support and services, better interoperability, and more professional communications with the end user", in the words of one of the panelists.

Another theme was the proliferation of products and projects, and the lack of cooperation between them. Of the hundreds of thousands of projects on Sourceforge, how many are viable and can meet enterprise requirements? Of those that can, how well do they work together and with proprietary technologies, so that larger enterprises can readily make use of them? To achieve this, their sheer number means there is clearly a need for more multi-lateral behavior on the part of these projects, much more so than the already-consolidated proprietary vendor community needs in order to succeed. But instead, open source seems to be balkanizing into specific ecosystems, e.g. Eclipse, Apache, and so forth, with developers choosing to be part of a given "club" over others. Similarly, many leading companies choose to "go it alone" and neglect working with other companies to improve the overall "fit and finish" of their products. If we're not careful, this trend can further limit our success.

But the good news is these challenges would be front-and-center at an event like the Think Tank. CIO's were raising these as issues, brainstorming sessions focused on these, and offline conversations frequently turned to these. Knowing we have a problem is half the battle.

The OSA was well-attended, including AdaptivePlanning's Bill Soward, Black Duck's Doug Levin, EnterpriseDB's Andy Astor, Hyperic's Javier Soltero, Ingres Roger Burkhardt, Iona's Peter Zotto and Larry Alston, OpenITWorks' Michael Grove, Sourceforge's Ross Turk, SpikeSource's Kim Polese, and Talend's Bertrand Diard. Thanks to all of you for your support, and for helping make the OSA part of the ongoing dialog on our industry's evolution.

At this point, the OSA could take credit for helping bring these issues to the forefront, but that would defeat the spirit of community and multi-lateralism that we have championed since our very beginning. Instead, let's continue to work together to drive commercial OSS forward, delivering solutions that customers need, in the form that they need.

And finally, hats off to the Olliance Group for organizing this event. The quality of people at this event was second to none, with numerous networking opportunities and very timely and relevant presentations. With every conversation there was something new to be learned and new perspectives to be considered. Andrew Aitken at one point mentioned that there will be a time where this event won't be needed anymore, but until then, we hope this continues to be a key event that helps move the OSS industry forward.