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Open Source projects gaining adoption

I’ve been looking at open source this week (as I sit in the SDForum Open Source: Entering the Mainstream event). I ran across an older NetworkWorld piece
talking about enterprise adoption of open source expanding out from the LAMP stack. The article gives a good overview of the open source projects and tools that are entering “mainstream” of the open source environemt.

Somewhat less developed, but more ambiitious is IBM’s Eclipse framework project. For a good overview of what Eclipse is and where it’s at now, check out this eWeek article discussing how Eclipse is coming out from IBM’s shadow and taking on life as an independent open source project. From a keeping-track-of-important-open-source-projects point of view, the piece gives a good precis of the relationship between Eclipse and other players:

Yet, while IBM no longer dominates the Eclipse Foundation, the organization’s failure to reel in two other Java heavyweights—Sun Microsystems Inc. and BEA Systems Inc.—has not gone unnoticed. BEA is, however, working indirectly with Eclipse on a project called Pollinate. The goal of Pollinate is to build an Eclipse-based IDE and tool set that leverages the open-source Apache Beehive application framework. Beehive is based on BEA’s WebLogic Workshop.

How I read that is that BEA is using Eclipse to build the IDE for Beehive, which is an open source version of WebLogic Workshop…. but one thing is for sure - industry leaders are making investments in open source tools development far beyond LAMP. We’ll watch to see what enterprise adoption looks like…..