[ Thanks to Braveheart for
this link. ]
“Enhydra, an open source application server, serves as an
example of collaboration between business and development in the
open source community. Maya Stodte takes a look at how the
developers of Enhydra were able to harness the powers of open
source development, as well as the open source business model, and
the commercial itch the Enhydra product was designed to serve.”
“Innovations in the open source community generally occur by the
old “scratch an itch” formula, where need leads to idea leads to
development. By their nature, open source innovations diffuse out
into the world. Sometimes they are never seen again by their
project originators, and from time to time they coagulate and turn
into the next Linux. Enhydra, the most widely used open source
application server, however, has taken a different tack. Enhydra is
succeeding where many others have failed — in making the
cooperation between the open source development community and the
enterprise productive. The result has produced solutions to some of
the problems that have long plagued open source/enterprise
collaboration, such as issues surrounding contamination of
proprietary software by open source licenses, and attracting
established companies to the use of open source software.”
“Although Enhydra was originally developed in a two-year
incubation period of closed-source operations by Lutris
Technologies, its destination has always been open source. In
January of 1999 Lutris open-sourced Enhydra, and enhydra.org
emerged to oversee future open source Enhydra development. Thus,
unlike many open source projects, when Enhydra hit the open source
development community (and commercial market), it was not only
ready for implementation, it stood on a structured and somewhat
more stable managerial foundation than many open source projects.
This kind of structure and reliability are well known aphrodisiacs
for commercial sponsors.”