The OSA Top Ten
In the March 2009 edition, we proposed "The OSA Top Ten Reasons to Adopt Open Source Software in the Enterprise." The first five reasons primarily concern pricing issues, which were dealt with extensively in the 2009 Annual Prediction Survey and in our special editions of OSA Alert in October 2008 and November 2008 on the impact of the current economic crisis on the OSS industry.

The second five reasons primarily concern the OS development model, the superiority of which was trumpeted last month by Michael Tiemann, Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, in his keynote at the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise Conference in Philadelphia. (The conference is sponsored by OSA member Chariot Solutions, and the management track was developed by OSA and OSA members.)

Tiemann kindly agreed to review his keynote and answer a few OSA Alert follow-up questions in the extensive and fascinating Q&A below.

Known as a thought leader and open source pioneer, Michael Tiemann today works as Vice President, Open Source Affairs at Red Hat. He also currently serves as President of the Open Source Initiative and the GNOME Foundation. In 1989, he co-founded the first profitable open source company, Cygnus Solutions. In a recent speech, he gave detailed, annotated support for the superiority of the open source development model, and ended up highlighting all five development-oriented benefits of open source on OSA's top ten list.

OSA BOARD UPDATE
New Board Member Appointed, Existing Member Begins New Term
On Monday, April 20, the OSA Board officially appointed Srinivas Polisetty, Director – Strategic Initiatives, NPS-ITIS, at Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) to fill the board seat previously held by Dominic Sartorio. The Board also reappointed Deb Woods, Vice President of Product Management at Ingres to the seat she has held for a year following a special election in 2008. Both will serve until the end of March 2011.

Srinivas Polisetty comes from an entrepreneurial background, having founded and sold two successful Silicon Valley technology companies. He later headed the Office of Innovation in CSC India, and currently serves as the Director of Strategic Initiatives in the North American Public Sector group of CSC creating next-generation offerings, working with strategic partners, identifying acquisition targets, and developing business solutions benefiting the federal, state and local markets in North America. Two of his strategic initiatives include open source services and cloud solutions and services.

Deb Woods is vice president of product management at Ingres. She shepherded the company’s move into software appliances, an innovative method of delivering open source software to clients. Deb is also responsible for Ingres Learning Services and the Ingres VIP program. Prior to Ingres, Deb was the vice president of product management at Red Hat, where she worked with customers and partners to bring the Red Hat Enterprise Linux products to the marketplace.