This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader. Whitehurst’s presentation lacked anything especially insightful or noteworthy and he has the advantage of being the new guy so he’s off the hook for anything that might have happened before he took the job.

What is apparent Red Hat’s no longer exciting. They’ve crossed over to respectable elder statesman of open source. The action is among the new batch of up-and-coming open source software companies who are not yet venture backed but are developing interesting technologies and services. Here are some of the companies that may well be the new open source superstars.

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Technorati Tags: Appcelerator, applications, Bitnami, Bitrock, Business, Conference, Enomaly, Loopfuse, MindTouch, Open Source, Red Hat, Ringside Networks, startups

Thanks to Tony Lawrence for inspiring today’s post. Hopefully these links don’t stink. 

Anthony Lawrence: Reasons I Don’t Like Social Media

Tools that once were valuable for pointing out the best of the web often become obsolete or spammy (you might say this about Digg). Tony’s example is StumbleUpon, a link sharing site that I love.  He contends that the social networking site has become clogged with junk or at least doesn’t provide consistent "quality" links. [Updated: Actually check the post comments for clarification.] Not all sites and tools stand the test of time even the spark that started the blogosphere Jorn Borger’s Robot Wisdom (now supplemented by his Auxilliary) is no were near as popular as moneymakers like TechCrunch and the Huffington Post. I wonder if ten years what sites will stand the test of time will the millions of MySpace and Facebook users have moved on to the next best thing or not. 

Stephen O’Grady: BitRock: Application Installation in a Networked World

I think Bitrock..rocks. Having point and click installation options for applications hosted on Linux and other non-Windows platforms is critical for adoption. Stephen has his usual insightful commentary. 

The basic value proposition, then, to an ISV is that Bitrock can package your application such that it’s suitable for cross-platform deployment, thus freeing application vendors from the burden of delivering multiple builds themselves. 

You an check out Bitrock’s handiwork at Bitnami.  

Matt Asay: Google: The New SourceForge?

Matt points us to this post from Google’s Brian Fitzpatrick that Google Code now hosts over 80,000 projects. I was surprised by their numbers so I took a look around and created a project to see what tools were available. I like the clean interface but it’s still got a long way to go to match SourceForge.net. I think there is value in a lot of their tools including their stats but Brett may beg to differ.

Why use downloads as an indicator of OSS success?

Brett Shoemaker at Microsoft’s Port25 riffs on the download metric for OSS software.

I continue to be surprised by the amount of weight given to downloads as a metric for OSS success. A topic Matt Asay also touched on recently over at The Open Road. Like Matt, I’m talking OSS at the product or company level (i.e., not OSS projects) and by success I mean sales.

I think the advantage is that the open source project offers full transparency unlike Brett’s examples. The implication is that successful open source business require success open source projects that include downloads as one of many metrics of success (I like forum activity, and code/documentation contributions as supporting indicators).  To his point there is not necessarily a direct correlation between downloads and profits and there are plenty of open source companies trying to figure out how to capitalize on the projects they sponsor. 

ComputerWorld’s Todd Weis: Q&A: New Red Hat CEO on JBoss, open source and the future

ComputerWorld’s Todd Weiss sits down with new Linux chief,James Whitehurst about the future of Red Hat and specifically JBoss. The best part about being the new CEO he doesn’t have to take responsibility for anything before his time.

Since being acquired by Linux vendor Red Hat Inc. in mid-2006, open-source middleware vendor JBoss Inc.has been a company in transition. It was well-known for its open-source middleware line that could be used by large businesses to better tie together their divergent applications. 

Entiva’s Alex Fletcher: Open source ecosystems and collaboration as the currency of innovation

Alex has some great commentary on disruption and open source.  

After attempting to portray how open source ecosystems can double as platforms, I think its logical to assert that they also serve as organic collaboration networks.Where the more open, flatter structural composition of these ecosystems creates a hotbed for the brand of collaboration that is required to scale in an increasingly "globalized" world. Interestingly, at the core of the seemingly generic term, collaboration, is the seeds for disruptive innovation.

CNET: Open-source software: It’s the free coffee cup of today

I had the opportunity to hear Chris Anderson (the Long Tail, Wired Mag) speak Friday night about how we are moving towards a "free" economy or more specifically businesses based on a free giveaway. I am anxious for the next version of Wired to see more on the topic. For now he’s got some good "free news". I think open source software illustrates his point. 

Companies used to give away pens, squishy balls and coffee cups to worm their ways into the hearts of customers. Now, they pass out database software.

John M. Willis: Cloud Computing and the Enterprise

Not exactly open source but I think the ability to build computing clouds is often built on open source infrastructure. Check out Enomaly’s Enomalism for open source management for elastic computing. 

Google’s New Open Source Blog

Because we love to marvel at all things Google.  

(via Glynn Moody)  

Technorati Tags: Bitnami, Bitrock, Chris Anderson, cloud computing, free, Google Code, JBoss, Red Hat, Social Media, SourceForge, StumbleUpon

If you want an easy way to install open source software you might want to take a look at Bitnami. There isn’t a huge amount of information about BitNami but a quick whois shows me that Bitnami.com was registered by BitRock founder, Daniel Lopez Ridruejo.

I would guess that this is the same technology as the open source BitRock installer that I have used to install other open source packages for MySQL, SugarCRM and NetDirector. The advantage here is that their stacks are an all inclusive package with dependency resolution that are updated from a single source. It’s the same problem that WISE and Installshield solve for Windows. However, Bitnami has a number of cross-platform packages for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

They also have a voting system to determine what stacks they should package next. So far they have four main stacks (Ruby, LAMP, WAMP, and MAMP) and list about 12 downloads for popular LAMP applications including:

• WordPress
• Joomla!
• Mediawiki
• Dokuwiki
• Drupal

I haven’t had the chance to test the Bitnami stacks on many different Linux distributions yet but if this is really the work of BitRock I am sure it will make it a lot easier for more people to install Linux.

Technorati Tags: Bitnami, Bitrock, Daniel Lopez Ridreujo, LAMP, MySQL, NetDirector, SugarCRM