Open Source iBO: The Great Experiment

ASI watchers may have noticed an uptick in patches lately. That’s no fluke says Mark Breland of ASI. It’s all part of an initiative to shorten development cycles and put code improvements into the field sooner.

One offshoot of that development initiative is ASI’s plans to open source its IBO product. iBO (iMIS Business Objects) is the standard way to integrate iMIS with other products or one-off customizations.

ASI is working with its partners community version of iBO. Following up on a recent webinar, ASI has invited several interested volunteers to form a steering committee to manage an open source community product spun off from the current iBO code base. Five volunteers were on the kickoff call – Bruce Wilson (McGladrey), Randy Richter (Association Technology Solutions), Jason Voccia (Computer System Innovations), Ted Husted (NimbleUser), and Troy Stenback (ASI Consulting) – along with Mark Breland of ASI.

The working plan is that ASI will donate the code and host a repository and case management system, and provide a collaborative space for the project. ASI will continue to maintain its own “enterprise” version separately, and the ASI version will be the only code base supported by ASI itself. Meanwhile, the steering committee will have full control over the “community” version, leaving us free to apply whatever patches or improvements to the “community” version as we deem fit.

While some of the volunteers (including myself) are concerned about creating a “fork” of the iBO code base, we came to see it as a stepping stone toward a more complete open source model. Our hope is that ASI will adopt our fixes and improvements into the “enterprise” version, and also supply patches to the “community” version, to help the code bases remain in sync. Initially, =each code base would be maintained separately, and ASI will remain in complete control of the official “enterprise” version.

The committee’s hope is that once we prove ourselves, we might be able to reunite the codebases in the future. But, in the meantime, we are eager to make the best use of the enterprise/community model.

Our next steps are to draft our “Rules of Engagement”, setup a mailing list, and look to ASI to setup the repository and case tracking tools, and settle some of the loose ends with Legal. I caught the short straw for drafting the Rules, but I can draw on experience with open source projects like Apache Struts and the Jakarta Commons, to help give us a solid starting point.

As a note, there are similarities between the Open iBO initiatve and the origin of Apache Tomcat. Sun originally donated a Java plugin to the Apache Software Foundation. Under the name “Tomcat”, the ASF extended and rewrote the codebase, and over the years, the ASF grew the product into a full-featured web server. A recent market survey indicates that today Tomcat has a 64% market share (http://ztrek.blogspot.com/2007/10/bea-oracle-market-share.html).

Keep watch here for further news about Open Source iBO. I’m looking forward to living through some “interesting times” with ASI.
-Ted.