Open Source Blog

While Aperi has the support of Network Appliance, Cisco, Computer Associates, Brocade, Engenio, Fujitsu, McData, and Sun Microsystems, IBM has so far failed to convince the likes of EMC, Symantec and HP to join its merry band, meaning that Aperi is missing the companies that are were responsible for almost half of all storage software revenue last year, according to Gartner’s estimates.

“The management of storage technology continues to flounder within a quagmire of vendor infighting,” noted Toigo in launching the Capsail initiative. “Despite lip-service to the contrary, hardware vendors have little to gain and much to lose by backing a cross-platform management solution."

Vendor consensus is not necessary to get an open source project off the ground, of course - and it is also true to say that some of the best known open source projects (Linux, Apache) flourished for some time without any direct vendor involvement.

The key to the initial success of an open source project is not vendor support and marketing dollars, but end user acceptance and individual developer involvement.

Sun may be the driving force behind the Openoffice.org productivity tools suite, but what drove Openoffice's initial adoptionthe was fact that it captured the attention of developers prepared to contribute to its development and users prepared to try out early versions and pass on the word (no pun intended) about an alternative to Microsoft.

Toigo - founded by storage columnist Jon Toigo - claimed that it has already received offers from around a dozen storage users to provide “sweat equity,” processing and network resources, and coding work, and has also been sent a detailed design for a token-based messaging system.

“For every management obstacle introduced by hardware vendors into their proprietary stove-pipe products, there is an angry consumer who has written a hack or workaround to get the information he needs about his equipment,” Toigo said.

It will be interesting to see how these two initiatives develop and which one manages to grab the end user mindshare.