Enterprises often resort to costly, inflexible, solutions from proprietary vendors as they look to build or upgrade infrastructure for deploying and managing business applications. Use of open source software within the enterprise is gaining traction in the minds of architects. This movement is being fueled by the need in today's economy to make IT become more cost-effective while providing increased business value. The increased consideration of using open source software is also being driven by the frustration of many enterprise architects when it comes to the noise created within the marketplace by vendors selling their wares.

Increasingly, many are starting to ignore the media hype within many industry rags regarding the big vendors and their latest offerings along with their promised payback that never seems to materialize. Some are simply saying no to vendor product strategies and are now building solutions from scratch.

Enterprise architecture has to take a rational view of the incorporation of open-source within the enterprise and balance it with business value, risk and culture. Many Fortune 500s have no strategy surrounding use of open-source yet it is a pervasive part of their architecture today. The vast majority of company's have open source software in use in production environments, which may include Linux, Apache, JBoss and so on. Some will think of open-source software as being free in terms of cost of acquisition while others who have vision will come to realize that the potential of using open source as a model for software development will help them build better software faster and cheaper.

This session will focus on the guiding an architect to thinking concretely about:

• The use of open-source software in production environments
• The changing model of software development aka The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• Figuring out how much free software really costs
• Cultural aspects of using open source including intellectual property, hiring practices, executive sponsorship
• Criteria that can further extend thinking around buy vs build
• Practical considerations around licensing
• Strategies to get your vendors to contribute to open source projects
• The responsibilities of corporations to contribute to open source software development
• The effect that open source will have on industry vertical software vendors
• Standards committees: Standards need working implementations

Please bring your business cards. The authors will be raffling off copies of their latest books!