Open Management Consortium VS HP,BMC et al

Resistance is good. Results are always very sensational. Check out the site.

Members?

About the Open Management Consortium
The Open Management Consortium was announced to help advance the promotion, adoption, development and integration of open source systems/network management software. The founding members of the Consortium are Ayamon, Emu Software, Qlusters, Symbiot, Webmin and Zenoss. For more information, please visit http://www.openmanagement.org.

About Qlusters, Inc.
Founded in 2001, Qlusters provides open source systems management software to automate the data center. openQRM significantly reduces annual management costs for the data center while helping increase server utilization and minimizing downtime for Fortune 1000 companies. Qlusters is partners with leading vendors including HP, IBM, Intel, and Red Hat. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with offices in Israel and New York. For more information, please visit http://www.qlusters.com.

About Emu Software
Emu Software, Inc. is the maker of NetDirector, an extensible management framework that brings features such as rollback, policy-based administration, multi-server changes, and an ergonomic interface to open source systems. Emu Software is the corporate sponsor of the open source NetDirector project and offers support and service offerings around the open source tools. Emu Software strives to deliver the leading cross-platform, cross-distribution configuration management solution for open source services such as Apache, Bind, Sendmail, and many others. Emu Software is headquartered in Cary, N.C. For more information, please visit http://www.emusoftware.com.

Ayamon, LLC
Ayamon, LLC was founded in 2003 with the purpose of helping to expand awareness and adoption of Open Source software in businesses and organizations worldwide. We believe strongly in the power, flexibility, outstanding value, and societal benefits that Open Source software has to offer. For more information, please visit http://www.ayamon.com.

Symbiot, Inc.
Symbiot is a leading provider of intelligent security infrastructure management systems (iSIMS). As the pioneer in applying risk metrics to adaptive network security, Symbiot utilizes proprietary genetic algorithms to measure, manage and mitigate risk to your networked assets. Through Symbiot.NET, SymbiotÂ’s customers benefit from adaptive profiles defined from industry groups, and other Symbiot customers for community centric security; a new approach to mitigating risk. For more information, please visit http://www.symbiot.com.

About Webmin
Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any browser that supports tables and forms (and Java for the File Manager module), you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and so on. Webmin consists of a simple web server, and a number of CGI programs which directly update system files like /etc/inetd.conf and /etc/passwd. The web server and all CGI programs are written in Perl version 5, and use no non-standard Perl modules. http://webmin.com.

About Zenoss, Inc.
Based in Annapolis, Maryland, Zenoss, Inc. is a systems management software company that is lowering the cost and complexity of enterprise systems monitoring and management through the power of its innovative software and open source development. The Zenoss software product provides an integrated, highly automated enterprise monitoring solution and is available for download at http://www.zenoss.org.

I think the guys will need more that just a conversation. Open the doors but stay focused. I think more of such "Open Minded" companies like Pentaho, SpikeSource, SourceLabs and the buck just doesn't stop there E-Learning proprietary software firms like Blackboard will evetually have to deal with Open Source intitatives like Sakai and to some extent even Moodle. Maintenance is the place where most companies (and Oracle comes to mind all the time) are raking the cash in. Look at Microsoft too. All the talk on MOF/MSF.

My dear friends! Learn one thing from me. Best practices are best for the guys who wrote it. You can set up frameworks but they just WONT apply to every Tom, Dick and Harry. Simply because best practices are not for sale. Information is not for sale. Knowledge has potential and can be sold (and deservedly).

OK so what's my point? Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and other biggies might think of getting into the maintenance mode but remember:

• Innovation may be dead , creativity isn't!
• You can come up with all kinds of models like SaaS but the customer is not stupid anymore.
• Customer/consumers aren't lazy either anymore.
• Wrapping same old song around a new package is not going to help anymore.

What the world and the business community has to come to understand is that Open Source's foundations live in an open mind. It lives and thrives for openness. It will die (like a fish without water) in the arms or in an embrace (some call it a *hug*) of a proprietary vendor. It was meant to be free. Sorry but the hard truth is Open Source (real good one then) does not have any ambition of rising to a point of becoming a "prime acquisition candidate" or something like that. It is a community effort. Its like being a country which does things for the good of it all. It will not just come back to the community and declare something like "Oh Sorry, From next week you will all be frenchmen or something like that" [No offence to my French brothers/girlfriends :-)]. The business community is not entirely getting the message. Joomla was pissed off when Mambo got into the "proprietary mode".

I wish these guys good luck and hope that more of the Open Source Management companies/initiatives come and join this movement.