Startup makes switching to open source easier

Spikesource has launched a collection of seven stacks of open source components that the company tested and certified to work together.

The stacks enable IT departments to pick a fully functional stack of applications instead of having to test and integrate dozens of open source solutions themselves, promising to make it safer and easier for companies to adopt and rely on open source.

The stacks contain applications, libraries, language runtimes, middleware and tools.

The startup company is a project of former Oralce COO Ray Lane, who currently works for the venture capital investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

"The inspiration behind Spikesource came from addressing interoperability and the realisation that automation was the key to doing so," chief executive Kim Polese said in a keynote at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

The stacks incorporate over fifty open source components in six programming languages that are tested across six operating systems, including Linux and Windows.

The company plans to make money by providing support for the stacks, as well as a premium update service that provides users with patches and updates for the components in each stack. The company will also make its test facilities available to clients.

To prevent users from mixing applications that have incompatible licences, SpikeSource has also formed an alliance with Black Duck, a provider of software compliance management applications.