This morning we held our second customer forum, at the San Francisco Courtyard Marriott.
Our customer forums are intended to educate customers on the OSA's work, and solicit their input regarding challenges they are facing and where the OSA should focus going forward.



Each of our customer forums have distinct topics, in addition to the overall topic of open solutions adoption and interoperability. Co-hosted by Palamida and JasperSoft, this event included a focus on best practices for ensuring IP compliance, especially in projects involving multiple open source applications. Approx 20 attendees from Bay Area businesses, with titles including developers and IT architects all the way up to CIOs and former CIOs, sounded off on this and other issues.

We started with JasperSoft's Barry Klawans and I giving presentations on the OSA and interoperability, followed by an excellent presentation on IP compliance issues by Palamida's Jeff Luszcz. By the way, all presentations plus a discussion forum are posted on the "Customer Forum" section of our community site.

We heard many war stories of open source projects gone awry because of compliance issues, the worst being of one software company buying another, only to find that its source base was so riddled with incompatibly-licensed code, and some of which was in violation of redistribution provisions of GPL and similar licenses, that much needed to be rewritten from scratch, to the tune of over 12 person-years of development. Would have been nice if a compliance best practice, or at least a software inventory, was in place prior to acquisition!

In addition to compliance, we also heard of other challenges... For example, how does one support applications involving multiple vendors, and how to ensure everything hangs together if every vendor has their own support SLA's, release trains, patch mechanisms, end-of-life policies, and so forth? While not a technical issue, this is an interoperability issue nonetheless that is critical for customers who are trying to keep the moving parts working together.

Tony Wasserman (of CMU's Center for Open Source Innovation and OpenBRR fame) also attended and started a lively discussion on dependencies... and not just tracking what database or app server an application may depend on. But what happens when you deploy multiple applications that purport to be compatible, but one runs on "patch level 21 of this version of Red Hat, but the other wasn't certified beyond patch level 17"? These minor details can cause deployment challenges, nullify SLA's, or worse, bite you in production.

But this forum wasn't just about raising problems, there were also discussions of possible solutions. The idea of a rating system was discussed. For example, as the OSA expands its interoperability projects and criteria, could we begin to rate various applications, so prospective customers know in advance what they are getting themselves into? The answer is yes, potentially leveraging OpenBRR as a starting point. Also, could there be a system by which common combinations of applications can be tested in advance (perhaps by the collective OSA membership before each ships their respective product releases) to ensure they work together in a common environment? Again, the answer is yes, and the OSA has started moving in that direction with our Common Customer View as a starting point. And finally, regarding IP compliance, is there room for best practices to ensure code compliance, not just in terms of tools to use and policies to enforce (although these are certainly necessary) but also in terms of process - How should enforcing compliance overlay the overall development lifecycle of an integrated application, and how to educate the broader industry on these best practices? Again, yes, and look forward to an OSA interop proposal in this area.

Overall this was a great event, and true to the OSA's spirit of open collaboration and listening to customers. Our priorities begin and end with what real business end users need in order to be successful, and these forums are a critical part of establishing what those priorities should be.

And finally, many thanks to Palamida and JasperSoft for hosting this excellent event!