Systems management software vendor BMC has formally announced its open source software strategy with the launch of its BMC Developer Network and four open source projects licensed under the BSD license.
The Houston, Texas-based vendor hired open source systems management specialist William Hurley as the chief architect of its open source strategy in March, and at the OSCON event in Portland, Oregon this week, Hurley revealed what the company has been working on.
The four new open source projects are adapters to integrate closed and open source technologies into a configuration management database (CMDB), and are hosted at the new BMC Developer Network site.
As well as hosting the projects, BMCDN also features developer centers for the company’s key products, forums, polls, blogs, and additional developer resources. It is designed to be an open community that will develop in response to developer needs.
Presumably, BMC was too busy pulling the content together to think up snappy names for its new open source projects, which are known as ALT2CMDB, CWKS2CMDB, HPAC2CMDB, and LAND2CMDB.
The ALT2CMDB project creates uni-directional data integration between the BMC’s Atrium CMDB and Symantec’s Altiris Service & Asset Management Suite, while CWKS2CMDB does the same for Cisco’s CiscoWorks Resource Manager Essentials. HPAC2CMDB relates to HP OpenView AssetCenter, while LAND2CMDB relates to Avocent’s LANDesk Asset Manager.
All four of the new projects are under the BSD License, and Hurley also announced that BMC has chosen that as the strategic license going forward for all BMC’s open source efforts.
Large software companies tend to muddy the waters by adopting different licenses for similar open source projects. We want our interaction with you to be as effortless and productive as possible, he said. We’re showing you our appreciation for your efforts by granting you all the rights you can stand. To us, that means adopting a single permissive license. There are many OSI-approved licenses, but the BSD license is the most open license available in the market today, and we will employ it for all our open source projects.
Originally created for the Berkeley Software Distribution Unix operating system, the BSD license is one of the most permissive open source licenses, and unlike the GNU GPL, allows for BSD-licensed software to be incorporated into proprietary products.
