The Open Solutions Alliance, a non-profit group backed by a number of commercial open-source suppliers has found that found interoperability is a foremost concern among open-source-software customers.

"Perhaps I was a little quick to congratulate Neelie Kroes on a job well done forcing Microsoft to extend its interoperability protocols to open source software vendors and developers. It now appears that the terms of the agreement mean that it is incompatible with the GPL..."

Results of a recent poll show that the stagnant economy may be leading more organizations to adopt open-source software to save on licensing fees, according ot the Open Solutions Alliance. Customers also are concerned about interoperability between open-source software and Microsoft Windows.

"The changes mandated by the European Commission in Microsoft's interoperability licences will continue to block Open Source developers, legal experts on this type of software say..."

Microsoft, the company least-likely to be associated with open source software, has made good on earlier promises to contribute to open source projects. The company first started its slow move to acceptance of open source in March and April of 2008 when the company announced a series of interoperability plans.

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 sluggish economy is contributing to commercial open source sales, but customers still rank interoperability with proprietary software and vendor viability among their top concerns, according to a new survey from the Open Solutions Alliance.

More good news for the open source community just in: an analysis of its enterprise customers by OpenLogic found that for 2007 as a whole, the use of open source among enterprise customers is up 26% year-on-year. Enterprises on average used a whopping 94 different open source packages last year, compared to 75 in 2006…

Here's a Microsoft quote on Mozilla: