Feature Story

By Kat Rollin

March 25, 2008 — The number of open source deployments running on Sun, for developing new applications and for running production applications, increases every day. As the largest commercial contributor to the open source community, Sun understands the incredible value of integrating open source software to help you reach your business goals. But managing and supporting large numbers of open source software packages on multiple systems can be a daunting task that can reduce the saving of using free software. Sun works with OpenLogic to help you fully realize the value and minimize the risk of your open source applications.

Open Source for the Enterprise

Open Logic provides software, stacks, and service to help you maximize the benefits of open source software. OpenLogic Enterprise can help you build, configure, and integrate your own software stack — including open source, commercial, and in-house applications — on-the-fly to meet your particular needs. The Management Suite within OpenLogic Enterprise includes tools to help you automate installation, configuration, integration, and testing of open source solutions. The OpenLogic Certified Library provides hundreds of open source packages that are certified to be enterprise-ready, supported by OpenLogic, indemnified, and maintained with current releases and security patches. OpenLogic currently supports over 75 of the most poplular open source software packages on Solaris on SPARC platforms, including Apache, MySQL, PHP, PostgreSQL, and Tomcat, with more coming every day.

OpenLogic Discovery can you find out which open source packages are running in your Sun environment on Solaris, Linux, and Windows workstations and servers. OpenLogic Discovery can identify over 900 of the most commonly used open source applications, including those that are not explicitly installed but are bundled with other software. It then provides a detailed inventory of the open source software, including version numbers. With this inventory, you can build a customer software stack in OpenLogic Enterprise to efficiently manage your open source environment

Ensuring Compliance in Your Open Source Environment

If you're like most companies, you probably don't have any formalized policies or management tools internal policies, regulations, and software license terms for open source software. As you use more open source products to create a solution, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage the growth and compliance of the environment. The OpenLogic Enterprise Management Suite enables you to easily define and manage compliance of open source policies and licenses. The Management Suite helps you review and approve open source licenses, define corporate usage polices by licence type, control user access to open source packages, and audit open source usage by package, so you can ensure compliance of your open source environment.

You can measure your organization's current open source polices and procedures against industry best practices by completing the Open Source Best Practices Scorecard from OpenLogic. The survey helps you identify where you can make improvements in sourcing and selection, technical productivity, compliance, and technical support.

OpenLogic and Sun

Businesses and organization, both small and large, around the world are developing or deploying open source applications on Sun's powerful, cost-effective, and eco-friendly servers. With OpenLogic Enteprise, you can effectively manage your software stacks, as well as corporate and licensing polices to help you maximize the value of open source for your enterprise.

Formerly a systems engineer for Sun, Kat Rollin now reports on partner solutions for sun.com and develops technical marketing communications for the technology industry.