Open Source Weblog

“It’s an ongoing debate,” he said. “We have not decided to go down that road.” Explaining the company’s relationship with the open source model, he added: “We do use some open source technology in replication on Linux, and we contribute to the Linux kernel, but we are a proprietary provider on top of open source.”

James Bottomley, CTO at SteelEye and chair of the OSDL Technical Advisory Board is a key Linux developer, maintaining the SCSI subsystem, the MCA subsystem.

While the company is keen to contribute to the open source development process, it is unconvinced that opening up the code to its core projects would be worthwhile. Key to the debate is whether it would be possible to create a thriving community around the company’s high availability clustering technology.

“The technology we deliver is not like an application per se, we don’t see that people can add that much value to it,” said Adams, noting that the number of people with high availability expertise that might contribute to an open source project is limited.

Clearly open source is not always the solution, and the ability to generate a thriving community should be a key consideration for any vendor.

While SteelEye sees little value in opening up the code to its core offerings, there are opportunities on the periphery where external help could add value for the company and its customers and partners.

One such area is the company’s Application Recovery Kits for specific packaged applications. “Those are areas where we think the community at large can add value,” said Adams. “That’s something that we keep a watching brief on.”

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