Open source provides an incredible amount of technical leverage for small companies. No matter who productive your rock-star programmers are and no matter how much judo you apply to your problems, solid infrastructure takes a long time and benefits immensely from broad involvement. It really does take a village to raise great infrastructure. The Ruby on Rails framework of today is a lot more productive than the one I was using before it was open sourced. I use features every day created by others, enjoy polish done by others, evade bugs caught by others. All work I would otherwise have to do myself. So I simply get more done for less effort than it would otherwise have taken. The same holds true for the other open source projects that have been cultivated in 37signals, like Prototype and Capistrano.

Open source technology is a boon to companies that want to add features and functionality to their applications without the overhead. It eliminates the cost of databases, operating systems, and other infrastructure components, enabling quick and cost-effective access to new features. According to a survey conducted by IT research firm Optaros, companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue reported average savings of $3.3 million in 2004 as a result of open source technology (September 2005). A similar survey conducted by IDC showed that open source databases are used by 33% of the 600 companies it surveyed.

As developers, we're familiar with the endless pains that result from maintaining overly complex systems. Some complexity is accidental, so we continually strive to remove its overhead from our application. The latest crop of frameworks and dynamic languages has demonstrated just how far simple implementations can go. However, many applications have an essential complexity that cannot be further reduced without sacrificing end-user functionality or integration.

In order to describe itself as an 'open source' company, need a company merely be 'a company that will help you make the switch to open source in your company' - or does it have to be one that lets users feely download, compile, and use the software in question? Where is the dividing line? How open is 'open'? At Enterprise Open Source Magazine we contacted a range of FOSS luminaries for their take on the issue.

Many in the Open Source community (including the camps following Tomcat, Geronimo, Struts, Spring, and Hibernate) have chosen to focus on solving problems of developer efficiency and software elegance, and are sometimes forced to leave production operating characteristics such as HA (high availability)/fault tolerance and central management control for future releases. Or, in some cases, the elegance of the framework stems from its lightweight nature and thus the user community as a whole can't be made to suffer the complexities of clustering and HA for the needs of the few.

Sun Microsystems recently announced its intentions of finally publishing Java under an Open Source license. But what does that actually mean? We'll take a quick look at what it means to be 'Open Source,' how the Java language specification compares to other more formal language standards, and the importance of the brand and certification programs. We'll then look at what benefits Sun may get from distributing Java as Open Source and at some of the problems that will have to be addressed.

On June 26, 2006 the Eclipse Foundation announced the availability of new releases of 10 Open Source projects. This simultaneous release event, named Callisto, garnered a lot of attention for the 10 projects involved. But, meanwhile, on the same day and without much fanfare, not even a press release, the Dali JPA Tools project shipped its first formal release numbered 0.5. With the release of Dali 0.5, developers now have a solid set of tools for developing applications for the new Java Persistence API (JPA) in Eclipse.

Open Source means different things to different people. For some it's a business model. For others it's a way of collaborating. Some see it as a way of reducing costs. And some are out to change the world.

By now, you've probably heard about Eclipse as 'the Open Source Java IDE' (). Today, several companies have looked past the Java IDE plug-ins provided as part of Eclipse, and are creating products that use Eclipse as a tool integration platform, both inside and outside of the Java arena. But what about using royalty-free, Open Source Eclipse technology as a general-purpose application framework for your next desktop, fat client, or embedded application? With the support provided by the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) and the embedded version of the same (eRCP) the idea is certainly not as strange as it first sounds. So we'll explains why Eclipse is a solid desktop, rich-client, or embedded application framework with the potential to greatly simplify and accelerate development as well as forever change the way developers think about writing Java applications.

Callisto is the simultaneous release of 10 major Eclipse projects at the same time. An important thing to note about Callisto is that even though it's the simultaneous release of 10 projects, it doesn't mean these projects are unified. Each one remains a separate Open Source project operating with its own project leadership, its own committers, and its own development plan. In the end, Callisto is about improving the productivity of developers working on top of Eclipse projects by providing a more transparent and predictable development cycle.

In an effort to provide developers with a productive environment, Oracle has been working on a very rich UI component framework for several years. This framework - ADF Faces - has now been donated to the open source community. More precisely, it has been donated to the Apache Software Foundation and is currently hosted in the Apache Incubator - ht tp://incubator.apache.org /projects/adffaces.html.

Out of the blue, with its unstoppable passion for homing in on THE issue of the day, the world's most-read business magazine - BusinessWeek - has triangulated on Java as one of the the software world's key ignition points right now.

AS well as examining the past comments about the prospects of an open-source Java by Jonathan Schwartz, now CEO of Sun, today's round-up of influencers and their opinions includes the thoughts of LinuxQuestions.org founder Jeremy Garcia.

Two years ago Rod Smith, IBM Software's VP of Emerging Technologies (and still with IBM today), wrote an open letter to Rob Gingell, Sun's Chief Engineer (now with Cassatt). IBM, Smith said, 'would like to work with Sun on an independent project to open source Java.'

'The fact that there is so much discussion going on is of interest,' wrote Sun's John Clingan in his blog yesterday. The discussion is 'all over the map,' Clingan noted: 'Some like the idea of Open Source Java. Some think that will negatively affect WORA. There doesn't seem to be any general consensus building. Perhaps that means there is a tremendous amount of pent-up innovation.'

Responding to remarks at Sun's February 2004 analyst meeting, Eric S. Raymond - President of the Open Source Initiative - in February 2004 wrote an Open Letter to Scott McNealy. The letter ends: 'Mr. CEO, tear down that wall. You have millions of potential allies out here in the open-source community who would love to become Java developers and users if it didn't mean ceding control of their future to Sun. If you're serious about being a friend of open source, if you're serious about preparing Sun for the future we can all see coming in which code secrecy and proprietary lock-in will no longer be viable strategies, prove it. Let Java go.'

'Carefully done, open-sourcing [Java] could actually promote interoperability by making it easier for disparate groups to align behind one code base,' wrote Sun's James Gosling in his widely read java.net blog at the end of April 2004.

'Why is it good to open source OpenSolaris and OpenOffice and bad to open source Java?' In an Open Letter to Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, that's what ActiveGrid CEO Peter Yared asked, back in March. Yared added: 'Can you please answer the following question with a single coherent sentence that people can remember and repeat? If I ask five Sun employees this question, I get five different answers, so having simple answers to these questions will clearly help your own workforce as well as your customers and prospects!'

'For Sun,' said Simon Phipps in a recent interview, 'the open source message is a very natural 21st century expression of how Sun has been doing business for more than 20 years.' Given that Phipps is Chief Open Source Officer at Sun, it is hardly surprising that he should be keen on what he sometimes calls, engagingly, the Zen of Free. With Phipps as OSO, Sun under Jonathan Schwartz is assured of a vibrant and high-profile role in the open source community.