The Future History of Open Source

Over the years one of the largest advocates of open source software sponsorship and advocacy has been Sun Microsystems.  Here is a short list of a few projects / products that many people will be familiar with that were driven (or at least significantly supported) by Sun:

• Java
• Open Office
• UNIX (Open Solaris)
• OpenSSO

There are other projects worthy of mention, but these are fairly popular.  Now, back in April of 2009, nearly one year ago, Oracle Corporation bought out Sun Microsystems and today all of the sun web sites point to the Oracle site.  And most recently we are starting read about what we can all hope is not a new trend for Oracle: the dumping of Open Source projects.

According to not403 blog at blogspot OpenSSO had been dumped from the Oracle product lineup.  Interestingly enough they are continuing to invest in their for-profit support of non-profit software and projects. I don't want to predict doom but if Oracle's business model doesn't include a vision for open source advocacy, then the open source world is loosing a big partner!

On the upside, there is a Norwiegan company named ForgeRock that has taken over the project and renamed it to OpenAM.

OpenSSO (or now OpenAM) is still the most popular open source single signon product for web site and web service applications on the internet.  If you want to learn more about the product, click the ForgeRock image above.

I guess we should be thankful that Sun brought us as far as they did investing in open source.  And we can continue to be thankful that groups like ForgeRock keep this open source movement moving forward.