Red Hat has signed a pair of agreements with Sun Microsystems that will help put the open source company on the fast track to delivering a more complete end-to-end application development and runtime stack for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers.

We know your company uses open-source applications. We also know many of you already have an open-source policy. Sort of. As CIO.com discovered when researching the adoption of open-source in enterprise IT, a quarter of respondents have a formal policy in place to control how such software is chosen, supported and deployed. Another 18 percent expected to adopt such a policy in the next 12 months.

Your company's IT department probably depends on at least one open source application. The software does the job, is budget-friendly, and it has an active open source community which is constantly upgrading the application. But few applications are perfect, whether proprietary or open source.

Launched in February, the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) came together to help open-source application vendors make their products work better together and gain visibility among enterprise users.

The Icelandic government has released a policy on free and open source software. In short, the policy states that when buying software free and open source software should be considered on an equal footing with proprietary software, that software based on open standards shall be chosen, that lock-ins to specific vendors should be avoided (choosing free software is one means to achieve this), that bespoke or customized software shall be reusable (and free and open source software achieves this), and finally that students of Icelandic educational institutes shall have the opportunity to learn about and use free and open source software on a par with proprietary software.

This policy applies to all state institutions and organizations operated with public funds.

Open source software is present in 85% of enterprises and the remainder expect to deploy it in the next year, according to research from Gartner. However, 69% of organizations don't have a formal policy for evaluating open source usage in their organizations, according to the Gartner survey. This opens up potential liabilities for intellectual property violations.

There is both a perceptual and an actual channel of openness in software. Users value the freedom of mobility as very close to what coders value as the freedom of source code access. The only reason there is a real gap here is that closed source systems, like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., don't actually allow you freedom of movement. It merely feels like that because the application is free and, fiscally speaking, the barrier for entry or exit is zero.

Open-source software may not make major inroads into industry-specific enterprise applications, according to an IBM open-source guru. The next 10 years will be "do or die" for this type of application, said Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and standards at IBM, in a LinuxWorld keynote address Wednesday.

North-by-South is a network of open source developers from all over the Americas. We work with companies to ramp up any software project--starting from scratch or helping with your existing website or application, specializing in open source solutions and rapid timetables.