Open Source Blog

This is abundantly clear from the list of the ten most influential movers and shakers which has Red Hat CEO, Matthew Szulik, ranked at number two.

"Szulik's bold acquisition of Java middleware vendor JBoss in April had a profound effect on his influence in this market. From running a company with a Linux distribution… this move made it absolutely clear that he wants to build an integrated, and properly supported open source infrastructure stack," writes Jason.

It's also worth noting the importance of Sun's open source software strategy (among other things) in placing Jonathon Schwartz at number one: "his early announcement that he is going to open source Java suggests he is not going to sit back and let things tick along as they were," notes Jason.

Open source also cropped up in the most influential vendor lists, specifically enterprise applications, application development, and BPM and integration.

"In the integration space JBoss's popularity - and indeed market footprint - cannot be overstated, and it is likely to become yet more influential now that it has been acquired by Red Hat," writes Jason again, this time abaout BPM and integration.

"Meanwhile, a number of open source ESB projects are commoditising the low-end of web services standards-based integration (although you will still pay if you want support). These include Celtix, ServiceMix and Sun's Open ESB.

"We could not discuss open source BPM, meanwhile, without giving a nod to Intalio and its BPMS 4.0, which supports BPMN, BPEL and BPEL4People, and which, of course, is free."

Meanwhile SugarCRM crops up in enterprise applications. "Important in its own right, SugarCRM also carries many of the hopes of open source business applications on its back," writes my colleague Angela Eager.

"The open source model requires volume, based on a large and active user base, and there is a question over whether there is sufficient momentum in the short term to support open source business applications. SugarCRM is set to become the bellwether for this market."

In application development, the influence of the Eclipse project is seen as even greater. "Virtually every major Java player outside Sun is involved in at least one Eclipse project, and with the exception of Oracle, nearly every Java player has committed to Eclipse as its current or future development platform."

Then, of course, there's the list of the ten most influential vendors in open source itself, which was an interesting list to put together,

As I explained in the article: "Open source is not a single sector of the market. Nor is it simply open source software: as IBM's Power.org project and Sun's OpenSparc project have shown, open source can also be applied to hardware. Nor is it simply a matter of picking the 10 biggest open source vendors. Clearly, proprietary vendors have a large influence over the success of open source."

That explains why the list ends up being a mixed bag. Here's a note of the ten chosen vendors, but for an explanation of why they were chosen, click here.

Dell
Free Software Foundation
IBM
Microsoft
MySQL
Novell
Oracle
OSDL
Red Hat
Sun Microsystems

Incidentally, this is of course a different list from the Open Source VIPs article, the first part of which will be in the next issue of CBR.